McHugh, Paul R. "Hysteria in Four Acts." COMMENTARY (December 2008).

In 1973, the journalist Flora Rhea Schreiber collaborated with Cornelia Wilbur, a Manhattan psychiatrist, in writing Sybil, the story of a young woman who, while under Wilbur’s care, developed sixteen “personalities.” In each distinct “alter”— alternative personality—she behaved in a different way, at one time or another “depicting” aggressive males, defenseless children, and intellectual women. In their book, which was an enormous bestseller in both hardcover and paperback and inspired a hugely popular four-hour movie for television, the collaborating authors proposed that the “disintegration” of Sybil’s mind into several personalities was the result of her having repressed the memory of sexual abuse she had suffered at the hands of her mother in childhood. Although the abuse itself was never confirmed, the book and the television movie ignited a craze. Schreiber heard from numerous women who credited her with opening their eyes to their own multiple personalities. Other biographies soon appeared. (Only one, The Minds of Billy Milligan [1981], remains in print.) Like Sybil, they all linked multiple-personality disorder (MPD) to childhood abuse—a practice that, at the time, was being reported with distressing frequency by pediatricians. What went unmentioned in Sybil was a serious difference of opinion between Wilbur and Herbert Spiegel, a fellow psychiatrist whom she had consulted. In a May 1995 interview, Spiegel told of having come to know Sybil well, examining her many times and arriving at the conclusion that she was not a multiple personality at all. Instead, Spiegel characterized Sybil as “a wonderful hysterical patient with role confusion, which is typical of high hysterics. It was hysteria.” But Schreiber, he related, rejected his interpretation summarily and insisted that they stick to the original diagnosis—because “if we don’t call [her] a multiple personality, we don’t have a book!” Looking back in 1995, Spiegel was impressed with how the publication of Sybil had started “a whole new cult, a whole new wave of hysteria . . . a hysterical response to hysteria.” In his view, therapists specializing in MPD were “taking highly malleable, suggestible persons and molding them into acting out a thesis that they [were] putting upon them.” But what did Spiegel mean by hysteria? And what clinical and historical background was he drawing on to confirm his diagnosis? Get the answer here: http://www.commentarymagazine.com/viewarticle.cfm/hysteria-in-four-acts-13663.