- SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- A psychologist says tape recordings that lay forgotten
in his desk for 25 years show the popular story of Sybil, the woman with
16 personalities, is bogus.
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- In a best-selling 1973 book, later made
into a movie, Sybil was portrayed as developing alternate personalities
who did things without her knowledge. The account blames the problem on
abuse Sybil suffered as a child, and says she overcame it with therapy.
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- The newfound tapes suggest these personalities
were actually created during therapy, through suggestions to a highly pliable
young woman, says psychologist Robert Rieber of the John Jay College of
Criminal Justice in New York.
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- Rieber said the tapes of conversations
between Sybil's psychiatrist and the book author show they were "not
totally unaware" that the story they told was wrong.
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- "Yet at the same time they wished
to believe it, no matter what," Rieber said. "I would prefer
to believe that there was as much self-deception as deception of others.
They were not malicious people."
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- An expert on multiple personalities said
although he doesn't know whether Sybil's personalities were created in
therapy, Rieber's written report sheds no light on the question.
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- Dr. Richard Gottlieb, an associate clinical
professor of psychiatry at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New
York, also said the report fails to show the book was a conscious misrepresentation.
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- Sybil's psychiatrist, Dr. Cornelia Wilbur,
died in 1992, and the book's author, Flora Rheta Schreiber, died in 1988.
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- Rieber spoke in an interview before presenting
his conclusions Sunday at the annual meeting of the American Psychological
Association. He said he got the tapes in 1972 from Schreiber, then a colleague
at John Jay College, but forgot about them until a conversation about Sybil
in 1997.
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- One excerpt in his report quotes Wilbur
telling Schreiber, "And I said, 'Well, there's a personality who calls
herself Peggy.' And uh, I said, 'She is pretty assertive. ... She can do
things you can't,' and she (Sybil) was very, uh, obviously perturbed by
this. ... And I said ... 'She wouldn't do anything you wouldn't approve
of. She might do something that you wouldn't think of doing."'
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- The excerpt also lists three other personalities.
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- That shows Wilbur was "carving out
the characters" for Sybil to absorb, Rieber said. Gottlieb, however,
said Wilbur may merely have been describing what she'd observed in therapy.
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- The tapes also show Schreiber improperly
dismissing a letter Sybil wrote to Wilbur in which she denies having multiple
personalities, Rieber said. The letter is reproduced in Schreiber's book.
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- Rieber's conclusions fall in line with
previously published opinions by Dr. Herbert Spiegel, a New York psychiatrist
who used Sybil in hypnotism research and says he was her surrogate therapist
when Wilbur was out of town.
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- Spiegel also concluded that Sybil's so-called
personalities actually arose from Wilbur's therapeutic technique of giving
names to various emotional states Sybil experienced. The problem was that
Wilbur mistakenly came to believe that they really were distinct personalities,
Spiegel said.
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- He said Sybil told him one day that Wilbur
wanted her "to be Helen" when talking about a particular event
in Sybil's past.
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- Spiegel suggested talking about the event
just as Sybil.
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- "Then she discovered she didn't
have to act like Helen in order to talk about it. ... It became clear Wilbur
was coaching her to be these different people. It was a very dramatic way
of carrying out therapy," Spiegel said.
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- He also said he told Schreiber that Sybil
didn't have multiple personalities, and "Schreiber said, 'If we don't
call it multiple personality the publisher won't want it, it won't sell."
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- But Dr. Leah Dickstein of the University
of Louisville in Kentucky, who said she was in touch with Sybil for several
years after Wilbur's death, recalls Sybil telling her, "'tell people
every word in the book is true."'
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- Dickstein, who knew Wilbur, said Wilbur
"had no need to make this up."
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