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Sybil Exposed: The Extraordinary Story Behind The Famous Multiple Personality Case (2011)

by Debbie Nathan(Favorite Author)

3.58 of 5 Votes: 1

ISBN

143916827X (ISBN13: 9781439168271)

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

Free Press

review 1: A very well-researched, if slightly over-written book... sometimes it seems like the author is trying to act "shocked... shocked!" about her topic, with a little hint of scandal, but for the most part Debbie Nathan makes interesting observations and also ties in the cultural and social milieu that embraced the concepts of the book when it was first published. Like millions of others I was fascinated with the book Sybil when it was published in the mid 70s, and had oddly mixed emotions of disappointment yet happiness when it turned out to have been a fraud. Debbie Nathan clearly and thoroughly uncovers all the truth she can find of three women who seem to have gotten lost along their life paths, and never really found their way clear to heal themselves. This book actually m... moreade me feel worse for the woman who came to be known as Sybil. A good psychotherapist would have been a major help to her, but she did not have one.
review 2: Fascinating examination of the folie-a-trois among a conflicted young woman suffering from undiagnosed pernicious anemia, a psychiatrist who longed for the heights of professional success and a journalist with a desire to produce something deep, serious and meaningful seduced by the fashionable lure of psychotherapy and a shocking case history.In Dr. Connie Wilbur's determination to prove her theory that dissociated states and multiple personalities were both more common than anyone before her had believed, and were the result of horrific child abuse, her work with Shirley Mason, the woman known as Sybil, would not only bring about an unusually close and distinctly unprofessional relationship between therapist and patient that would last until Wilbur's death, but lay the foundation for the unquestioning acceptance of the 'recovered' memories of thousands of (mostly) women and children suggesting an unseen epidemic of ritual and Satanic abuse and murder by cults scattered all across North America. Debbie Nation details the combination of personal ambition, shoddy research, lack of understanding of the ease with which false memories can be constructed, especially in therapeutic relationships and when hypnosis or drugs such as Pentothal are used, and reluctance to critically examine both one's own theories and those of professional 'experts' that led to a "wave" of MPD diagnoses and accusations of ritual abuse, rape and murder. Fascinating book. less

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