My life in books

With Sybil Exposed: The Extraordinary Story Behind the Famous Multiple Personality Case, Debbie Nathan presents the results of thorough examination of the fascinating 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 painstakingly 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.