Sybil is a book written by Flora Rheta Schreiber in 1973 about a woman named Shirley Ardell Mason. Ms. Mason was born on January 25, 1923 in Dodge Center , Minnesota. Her story is the most famous case of Multiple Personality Disorder on record. A movie was also made in 1976 based on the book.
According to people who knew Shirley's family in Dodge Center, her mother was given to bizarre behavior and controlled Shirley very strictly. Her father and grandmother were kind to her, but unable to do anything about the mother's mistreatment of Shirley. The family were Seventh Day Adventist, a religion that was apparently regarded with some suspicion by Dodge Center residents because of its superficial resemblence to Judaism.
In the early 1950s, Shirley was a substitute teacher and a student at Columbia University. She had had blackouts and emotional breakdowns for a long time, and finally presented for psychotherapy hoping to work on the issues which caused these problems. Shirley's therapist was Dr. Cornelia Wilbur , a Freudian psychiatrist.
In the book Sybil is a patient with severe issues of social anxiety and memory loss. After extended therapy Dr. Wilbur discovers that Sybil has 16 separate personalities. She uses hypnosis and sodium amytal interviews to encourage Shirley's various selves to communicate and reveal information about Shirley's life. Some of Shirley's people are:
- Sybil: Substitute day-care teacher who often experiences "missing time"
- Peggy: 9 years old, Peggy is bold and brassy, but can become angry and frightened. She often talks incoherently and repeats a phrase over and over. She breaks glass when she is upset.
- Vicki: Proper and formal to a fault. Vicki speaks fluent French, and is aware of everything that goes on in the system.
- Vanessa: An artistic and beautiful piano player, she befriends Rick, a man who lives in a neighboring apartment.
- Marsha: Sybil's dark and suicidal personality. Marsha unsuccessfully attempts to kill herself, although she knows that killing the body will result in the death of all the selves.
Dr. Wilbur decided that Shirley's multiple personalities resulted from childhood abuse at the hands of her mother, who was apparently schizophrenic. While the mother's bizarre behaviour was readily confirmed by Shirley's contemporaries, specific incidents related in the book may have been overdramatised for shock value. Shirley's therapy records have never been released, and both she and Dr. Wilbur are deceased as of 2004.
Shirley Mason later moved to Lexington, Kentucky where she taught art classes and ran an art gallery out of her home for many years. She died of breast cancer on February 26, 1998. A nonfiction book and film by psychiatric historian Peter Swales are planned about Shirley and her relationship with Dr. Wilbur.
References
Last updated: 05-07-2005 12:04:23
