<p> With the phenomenal success of <em>Sybil</em>, popular culture lurched into a weird twilight zone of repressed childhood memories replete with sadistic parents and Satanic daycare centers. The 1973 book and the 1976 made-for-TV movie, starring Sally Fields (who won an Emmy for her efforts), wasn't pop culture's first excursion into multiple personality or dissociative identity disorders. Like <em>Sybil</em>, <em>The Three Faces of Eve</em> (1957) was a popular film based on a case history. It starred Joanne Woodward as a young woman with a trio of identities. In a bit of clever casting, Woodward played the psychiatrist in Sybil. </p> <p>But the problem with the '70s popularization of multiple personalities, as investigative reporter Debbie Nathan finds in her book, <em>Sybil Exposed: The Extraordinary Story Behind the Famous Multiple Personality Case </em>(Free Press), is that the case history was more an agenda than a record of diagnosis and treatment. By unpacking the papers of Sybil's author Flora Rheta Schreiber at John Jay College and scrutinizing them, Nathan found that the 16 personalities of the patient identified as Sybil “were provoked over many years of rogue treatment that violated practically every ethical standard of practice for mental health practitioners.” </p> <p>The perpetrator was the psychiatrist Cornelia Wilber, who molded her talk therapy sessions with a dissociative woman according to her own theories. Wilbur was a type common among academics determined to make their careers by discovering new ground, even if the ground is thin or illusory. As Nathan notes, when <em>Sybil</em> was published, multiple personality disorder was a rare diagnosis andlike the 1957 Joan Woodward moviewas limited to two or three personalities within one person. Sadistic childhood abuse was not usually considered a trigger. Wilbur, however, had a hypothesis and was determined to prove it by manipulating her patient. </p> <p>Nathan reads the material she uncovered from a nuanced perspective. She believes Wilbur was a feminist whose intentions were to encourage her female patients to “follow their dreams, even though the therapy she used on them was bizarre, requiring as it did that they become multiple personalities in order to receive her care.” Well, perhaps. But <em>Sybil Exposed</em> offers a good lesson on our media saturated world. “Truth,” as presented in documentaries, docu-dramas or “reality” programming, may not be true at all. </p>
