Wiki is your friend. I was around then, and it got really ridiculous. Remember the whole “backwards Satantic lyric masking”?
I don’t recall Nathan saying one led to the other, but I’m fuzzy on the details of the timing of both stories. It’s true that they’re both based on the idea of repressed memories and I can believe there were some similar factors. Dr. Wilbur was convinced that whenever she pumped Sybil and her other patients full of pentothal and other barbiturates, everything they said was a recovered memory of something that really happened instead of, you know, the ramblings of someone who was stoned out of their minds and getting suggestions from a therapist. That’s how Nathan came to this story, I think. She’d written about the Satanic craziness and the McMartin case earlier. And in the Satanic abuse cases, people heard wild stories from children and became convinced they were true.
Multiple personality disorder was seen as a result of ritualistic Satanic child abuse, and the two got very intertwined. Michelle Remembers is such a piece of crap.
It was at this time that Billy Milligan, a serial criminal, beat three rape charges be claiming to be a multiple and that a female lesbian personality commited the rapes. Later, FBI man John Douglas would point out that he never met a criminal trying to use the MPD defense who was diagnosed BEFORE being arrested!
I’d never heard the connection before. It doesn’t sound clear that one led to the other. Satanic ritual stuff is even whackier than MPD.
I had a weird third hand connection to one of the child abuse cases cited in the wiki, still bothers me to this day.
I’m not that familiar with the Seventh Day Adventists- my understanding is that they go to church on Saturday, have a Fundamentalist worldview, practice a strict mostly vegetarian diet, and like the Jehovah’s Witnesses have some beliefs peculiar to them that most would consider loopy but at the same point they’re on the saner side of ‘cult’.
The reason for mentioning is that the first time I heard the validity of Sybil challenged it was by the 7DA church that Sybil’s family attended. At that time they were still protecting her real name (Shirley Mason was still alive), but they had recognized the story from various details and were disputing the claims made about their religion (i.e. that it’s essentially a cult where women are very repressed and children and child abuse generally ignored) and their role in a cover-up of little Sybil’s abuse. They pointed to evidence that they had assisted in the prosecution of a couple of their members who were guilty of domestic violence around the same time as the events in the book and that members of their community were frequent guests in the Mason/Dorsett home, some of them staying with them for extended periods of times as boarders, and would certainly have noticed some evidence of the almost demonic abuse recounted.
I can see why they were offended, and I can also believe that people in the Depression Era could have turned a blind eye to pretty much anything short of a kid being publicly flayed alive, so I remember thinking it said nothing one way or the other of the truth value.
Assuming the diagnosis was completely wrong, I wonder if Shirley Mason was so attention starved/dependant on Dr. Wilbur that she knowingly kept up the deceit or if she really believed she had many additional personalities.
Trivia: In the Sally Field miniseries, Dr. Wilbur was played by Joanne Woodward, who won an Academy Award in her 20s for starring in The Three Faces of Eve, one of the first, if not the first, movies about (the condition formerly known as) multiple personality disorder and also based on a book that was supposedly based on a true story. The book that inspired Eve also featured childhood sexual abuse that was unable to be included in the '50s movie, which was one reason Woodward said she was attracted to the Sybil role (the fact that it was a good role for an actress over 50 in an industry notoriously unkind to same being probably another).
The Three Faces of Eve was about a woman who had three different personalities. After the whole Sybil bruhaha, “Eve” revealed herself to be Chris Sizemore, and claimed she had over twenty different personalities!
If one was named Tom, that would explain a lot.
The stuff Mattie Mason was accused of doing in Sybil was every bit as crazy as the Satanic abuse: she supposedly raped her daughter with all manner of household objects, beat her, locked her in confined spaces, crapped on lawns all around town, and had lesbian orgies in the woods. I’m sure there’s other stuff I’m forgetting. Her daughter had MPD because of horrible abuse, you see.
Well yes. I meant the aspect of Sybil leading to the Satanic abuse fad. The connection of bad mental health treatment is there, but MPD is not the same as repressed memory (well except that I consider them both BS).
There was also a book/miniseries called When Rabbit Howls that out-Sybilled Sybil by having a woman named Truddi with more than a hundred personalities (begging the question “When in the hell does she have the time to just be herself?”). The real woman went on the talk show circuit and was truly pitiful, and the miniseries starred Shelley Long who was also truly pitiful (she did not give Sally Field a run for the money but rather came off as a drama queen with mood swings). The money shot in the miniseries- and it totally was a money-shot, you can see them saying to really promote this- was a stepfather who tossed Truddi into a pit and covered her with snakes (and he also sexually abused rabbits, thus inspiring the title [I wonder if one of her personalities was Jerzy Kosinski?]).
Some of the people who claimed to suffer from ritualistic Satanic abuse also claimed to have Multiple Personality Disorder. This happened at the time when Sybil was considered a true story. I do see a connection there.
I remember that shortly after the movie about Truddi Chase premiered the guests on tabloid TV with MPD skyrocketed and even Roseanne Barr (then still starring on her show) claimed in a bio that she had MPD and could actually remember being sexually abused by her parents from the time she was six months old.
Geraldo Rivera is a crucial link in the Satanic Panic genealogy, though. He’s the one who really introduced mass media to the illusion of the occult and nationwide conspiracy being involved in ritualized sexual abuse, which mated with the repressed memories phenomenon (probably in an abusive act that involved a counter top, retarded twins, a duck, and a creme brulee torch) to create a super-sensation bullshit storm.
I’ve read When Rabbit Howls. The title refers to the sound an injured or dying rabbit makes. The stepfather allegedly sexually abused livestock (cows? sheep? it’s been a while) in addition to Truddi and her half-sister, but not rabbits. According to the book, “Truddi” is a facade for the other personalities to live through. The original personality is dead or frozen or something like that and has been since the age of about 2.
I’m glad he had his standards. 
They’re not the same thing, but the idea of repressed memories was central to MPD and the idea of recovering those memories was central to treatment.
I understand that similarity, but I’m still not seeing a cause and effect relationship between Sybil and the Satanic abuse scares. You may as well blame Freud for creating the repressed memory theory in the first place, and IMO that would be well placed blame.
I attended a lecture that Ms. Nathan gave at our local university when she was plugging her book and I did have one concern about her position and the way she presented it.
And that’s one of balance - just as it is unwise to attribute unusual behavior to childhood trauma until ruling out physical health problems it is also important to recognize that the horrific abuse of children does occur and can cause serious and severe physical problems.
As I watched all those earnest, young soon-to-be social workers taking diligent notes I kept silently urging, “C’mon, Debbie, at least say one word about how hard it is to sort through the tangled web and that it may be a combination. Say something, anything about how even the finest families may be able to hide abuse. Please don’t leave the most naive among us listening set up to possibly discount someone withe Dissociative Disorder. Give them something they can use in their working lives besides that fact that you are correct.”
She disappointed me in that respect. But I get it.
I understand what you’re saying, but in Nathan’s defense, there’s no evidence that that’s what was going on with Shirley Mason. Her childhood was repressive and that was certainly related to her emotional problems, but I don’t think I would call her upbringing traumatic and nothing in Nathan’s research suggests her health problems were related to childhood trauma.
I wonder if kids who survived the Holocaust or the Killing Fields or other world class atrocities often had repressed memories, or if the fact that what happened was usually pretty public (i.e. no need to put on a mask for the neighbors) assisted in coping.
I agree.
And I’m glad that you responded as my reaction to your post #28 was a strong one so I consider you equally guilty. Heh.
All the things you listed in that post somewhat mockingly, as though they could be considered unbelievable, are not so to police, judges, social workers, hospital workers. Even in small, midwestern towns.
Those who can list them in disbelief are more fortunate in their innocence than they know.
I’m sure that Ms. Nathan doesn’t need defending and she did her research. But she had an opportunity to provide a balanced view and emphasize its importance and it was all about her instead. Guess you had to be there.
I may be more sensitized to the issue because I worked with victims during the witch-hunt period and was exposed to more than a little of the fall-out. During that time people in the helping professions were really struggling with the belief/ disbelief issue. For many it was “damned if you do/damned if you don’t.”
There was little preparatory education about it and a scarcity of resources to self-educate. Things a younger generation may take for granted, and Nathan is younger, were unknown at that time to the average person. I just can’t bring myself to assume that the majority of her audience, from their age-group, were that savvy.
That’s why my perception of her lecture was labled “plugging her book.” Hope they didn’t spend too much for the commercial.