Sybil was a bestselling book in the 1970s and was adapted as a 1976 television mini-series and a feature-length docudrama in 2007. Author Flora Schreiber and Sybil's psychiatrist, Dr. Cornelia Wilbur, became rich and famous as a result. Sybil also profited, but her true identity remained a secret until after all three women were dead. Much of the sensational story was fabricated, according to journalist and author Debbie Nathan. She reveals the truth about the case in her new book, Sybil Exposed: The Extraordinary Story Behind the Famous Multiple Personality Case, which she discussed in a recent interview on The Current.
In the original book, Sybil is portrayed as a young woman who started seeing a psychoanalyst in New York City in the early 1950s. Nathan described what happened after a few sessions, as detailed in the book: "She had a very dramatic moment when she started smashing windows, and split into another personality, into a little girl. And as she went into further therapy with the therapist, she developed many other personalities, a total of 16. The therapist assumed that something terrible must have happened to her when she was a child to create this kind of splitting in her consciousness. So she spent many years working with her.
And ultimately Sybil remembered terrible, hideous sexual abuse and torture by her mother, and once she came to remember that, she reintegrated and was able to have a happy life after that.
Sybil's case generated widespread fascination both in the general public and the medical community, and a group of psychiatrists and psychologists successfully lobbied to have multiple personality disorder included in the DSM ( Diagnostic and Statistical Manual).