NY Times The
notion that a person might embody several personalities, each of them
distinct, is hardly new. The ancient Romans had a sense of this and came
up with Janus, a two-faced god. In the 1880s, Robert Louis Stevenson
wrote “Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” a novella that provided
us with an enduring metaphor for good and evil corporeally bound.
Modern comic books are awash in divided personalities like the Hulk and
Two-Face in the Batman series. Even heroic Superman has his alternating
personas.
But
few instances of the phenomenon captured Americans’ collective
imagination quite like “Sybil,” the study of a woman said to have had
not two, not three (like the troubled figure in the 1950s’ “Three Faces
of Eve”), but 16 different personalities. Alters, psychiatrists call
them, short for alternates. As a mass-market book published in 1973,
“Sybil” sold in the millions. Tens of millions watched a 1976 television
movie version. The story had enough juice left in it for still another
television film in 2007.
Sybil
Dorsett, a pseudonym, became the paradigm of a psychiatric diagnosis
once known as multiple personality disorder. These days, it goes by a
more anodyne label: dissociative identity disorder. Either way, the
strange case of the woman whose real name was Shirley Ardell Mason made
itself felt in psychiatrists’ offices across the country. Pre-"Sybil,”
the diagnosis was rare, with only about 100 cases ever having been
reported in medical journals. Less than a decade after “Sybil” made its
appearance, in 1980, the American Psychiatric Association formally
recognized the disorder, and the numbers soared into the thousands. [...]
As retold in this latest video documentary from Retro Report,
part of a series exploring past news stories and their consequences,
the phenomenon burned most intensely for roughly a decade, from the
mid-1980s to the mid-'90s. Then it faded from public view, partly the
result of lawsuits brought successfully against some psychiatrists, who
were found by the courts to have used dubious methods to lead their
patients down the path of false memories.[...]
Dr.
Wilbur did not write up her findings in some dry professional journal.
Instead, she went looking for a large audience, and enlisted a writer,
Flora Rheta Schreiber, to produce what became a blockbuster. But as the
years passed, challengers began to speak up. One was Herbert Spiegel, a
New York psychiatrist who said that he had treated Ms. Mason when Dr.
Wilbur was on vacation. Dr. Spiegel described his patient not as a
sufferer of multiple personality disorder but, rather, as a readily
suggestible “hysteric.” A harsher judgment was rendered in the 1990s by
Robert Rieber, a psychologist at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, a
New York City school where Ms. Schreiber taught English. After
listening to tape recordings that he said Ms. Schreiber had given him,
he concluded that “it is clear from Wilbur’s own words that she was not
exploring the truth but rather planting the truth as she wanted it to
be.” Debbie Nathan, a writer interviewed for this Retro Report
documentary, piled on still more skepticism in her 2011 book, “Sybil
Exposed.” Perhaps inevitably in a dispute of this sort,
counter-revisionists then emerged to denounce the doubters and to defend
“Sybil” as rooted in reality.
Overwhelmingly,
those receiving a diagnosis of the disorder have been women. They
typically had rough childhoods. A pattern to their stories — Ms. Mason
fell squarely within it — was that they endured horrific physical and
sexual abuse when they were little. More than a few claimed to have been
the victims of torture at the hands of satanic cults. In many cases,
their memories were brought to the surface through hypnotism or with
injections of so-called truth serums like sodium pentothal. But were
those recollections real? The “Sybil” phenomenon went arm in arm with a
reassessment of certain psychiatric techniques. Some studies concluded
that people may have become less inhibited with pharmacological
intervention, but not necessarily more truthful. Other research found
that hypnosis sometimes creates false memories. Those who dismiss Dr.
Wilbur’s work as hokum say that induced false memories lay at the heart
of her work with Ms. Mason. [...]
No question I have multiple "personalities". I don't mean this in any scientific sense. One simple illustration. I've lived most of my life in Maryland. When I speak to Goyim who have a Maryland "accent", I find myself naturally talking to them with a tinge of that accent. (It's not quite a drawl, it's more of a soft "slur" -- for example, "Mary-land" becomes "MEHrruh-linn'.) This is not an affectation. It's like part of me comes to the fore that's been buried deep inside of me otherwise. I have many other "personalities". I've noticed this in others, too. My mother, A"H, grew up Brooklyn and when she spoke to relatives and friends from there, sometimes somehow an "r" became appended to some words ending in an "ah" sound.
ReplyDeleteAnd it's not just the accent that changes in me; it's my whole way of feeling. Even what might be termed small changes can trigger large changes. I write a lot in journals. My style of writing changes depending on the pen, ink, and paper I'm using. Even the app on my iPad I'm drafting this comment in influences how I express myself.
Again, this is not just a manifestation of a gloss on my core being; to my shock, I've come to realize that I'm a company of people. Through my study of Mesilas Yesharim by the Ramchal I've become able to integrate my diverse, and sometimes at odds, personalities. And again, I've got much evidence this occurs in others, too.
You can find this kind of behavior in the animal kingdom, too. The whole concept of an animal in captivity going "feral". I don't pretend any of this is scientifically presented. Just something for all of us -- and by that, I mean all the different "me's" -- to think about.
Addendum:
ReplyDeleteAt 11:10 Dr. Spiegel makes a similar point:
"Were different people at a party -- hopefully -- then when we're at work."
This topic is something that's been touched on before in this blog, and I think bears revisiting. When Jewish kids are brought up "Modern" they can develop two distinct "personalities", a Jewish personality and a non-Jewish personality. Up until about sixty years ago in the U.S., the American mainstream culture and Jewish values were not so divergent. Marriage meant a relationship between a man and a woman. A "gay old time" meant sitting in front of the TV watching the Flinstones. Contrast that with the emails I've been getting through the local listserv inviting people to join a "...group...for Orthodox Jewish parents with lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender children seeking peer support. We will also discuss ways to help parents and families navigate in their communities and be advocates for their children."
This is a tacit statement that it is not possible to integrate "Modern" and "Orthodox" and the approach should be "just accept our kids as they are, darn it! Be they thieves, homosexuals, Shatnez fetishists, (you name it). After all, we have PROFESSIONALS who tell us its 'genetic', so they just can't help themselves."
And then there are Tumblr's "multiples" and "otherkin"...
ReplyDelete