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At some point I need to do a post round up of the three plays I saw in something like a week and a half—and all really good!
Before I get to that, I had one of those things this week when a couple of things seemed to happen that commented on something I was reading and thinking myself. And it's very much related to fandom things.
I'll start with last week's Community, which as you've probably heard (hopefully not entirely from Community fans that annoy you!) is being put on hiatus. There were a bunch of comments about last week's episode, in which the Dean tried to make a commercial for Greendale college, with Abed also making a documentary about the process because, as Abed and Luis Guzman both agree Hearts of Darkness (the documentary on the making of Apocalypse Now) is much better than Apocalypse Now. The ep has naturally spawned really interesting meta about the process of having stories and how the stories create reality, because they are a way for people to explain their experience of something via emotion.
I was particularly eager to think about that because of a book I've been reading, Sybil Exposed by Debbie Nathan. Perhaps you already know Sybil, because she was a huge cultural phenomenon in the 1970s. She was the subject of the "nonfiction novel" Sybil by Flora Schreiber, which told the story of Sybil Dorsett, a woman with 16 personalities who was cured via therapy with her brilliant, caring psychiatrist, Cornelia "Connie" Wilbur. The book was huge and later was made into an awesome TV movie with Joanne Woodward (who once herself starred as multiple personality Eve in The Three Faces of Eve) and Sally Field, who until then was known for her goofy sitcoms.
I hadn't realized, since when I read/saw Sybil in high school it was years after either came out, was that Sybil essentially created the modern understanding of multiple personality/dissociative identity disorder, and the idea of repressed memories brought out through therapy. That, of course, eventually peaked in the 90s with thousands of people diagnosed with the disorder (before Sybil it wasn't even in the DSM) without half the symptoms described in the book, and many therapists sued when the memories they recovered turned out to be completely false.
Memory, it turns out, doesn't work like a Pensieve.
Our heads our not filled with objective movies that store our entire life if we could only access it. In Sybil Exposed Nathan puts together her own story of Sybil (real name Shirley Mason), Connie and Flora Schreiber, using transcripts and records and interviews with people who knew them. I don't want to call Nathan's story the 'true story' since she, too, is making her own story out of events and facts and understanding them through her own beliefs and trying to make a linear narrative. But it certainly brings out real things about the whole story that are clearly important.
Like the fact that Wilbur very much appeared to pre-diagnose Shirley with MPD, which she was already interested in, broke every ethical guideline for analysts, fed her enough powerful drugs to make Shirley incapable of supporting herself, asked Shirley leading questions while she was high on pentothal, never found evidence for anything she said, and had a big history of doing experiments that validated her preconceived ideas. She also, btw, wrote a book on homosexuality being a mental illness that came (like most things, in her view) from having a terrible mother. When she died she’d spent a long time pushing MPD as a serious disorder and was considered an expert on it.
So, putting out there that this book gets really dark in case you're put off by that, but it's also fascinating in dozens of ways, and I'm going to concentrate on one of them, which is that all three of these women happened to be women for whom lying/truth-stretching was an important part of their lives.
Schreiber was a freelance writer who'd long learned to fake "real stories" to illustrate some of her articles, using the tools of fiction to present true stories. (This one's particularly significant to me since my own job is exactly that, using the tools of fiction to present real stories, but we have a much stronger devotion to facts than Flora.)
Connie Wilbur spent years doing experiments in overcrowded mental hospitals without control groups or double-blind protocol and vague definitions of "better" or "worse." Shirley as the child of strict Seventh Day Adventists who at the time considered all fiction or make believe was a sin, and grew up terrified she was going to hell for her fantasies about imaginary friends. One story that's got to be upsetting for anyone in fandom: as a little girl Shirley cut out words and letters from magazines and hid them under her dolls. When alone she used the letters to write stories on the floor hoping that they weren’t' really stories if they could later be swept up and turned back into jumbled letters! Shirley's active imagination often led her to have fantasies about things like winning art contests or being present at the death of a boy she read about at the paper. I know I've done the same thing plenty of times. With Shirley, however, there's evidence of her actually telling other people about these things and presenting them as facts. It's unclear whether she actually came to believe they were real after years of telling them to herself.
So Sybil in the end, sort of becomes layer upon layer of stories built on a small collection of facts and I wound up just getting so into the way they fit together. For instance, the movie changes things from the book. The book changes things from the actual years of therapy between Connie and Shirley. The therapy itself was in large part Sybil and Connie creating a fiction together. These fictions are all adjusted to fit different audiences--Connie wanted stories of abuse and multiples; Sybil was desperate to give Connie anything she wanted; Flora Schreiber said the public needed fully developed personalities and a happy ending. There's something really cool when you can follow something through all the layers we have, watching it change like in a game of telephone.
I'm going to just stick to one example because the whole book's full of them, but for instance: Sybil's earliest personalities were Peggy Ann, Peggy Lou, Vicky and Mike. These were the first personalities Sybil claimed to have, and while none of them were really alters, they did all come from her life. As a child her mother (who didn't abuse her) used to sometimes call her Peggy Lou/Peggy/Peggy Ann when she thought she looked cute. Little Shirley would then act saucy, which was "in character" for Peggy and her mother would laugh. In winter her father would let her hang around his workshop. He'd dress her in overalls and a cap for the cold, and since that's what boys wore in the 20s, he'd jokingly call her Mike. Finally Vicky was Shirley's imaginary friend who she made up--Vicky was a Catholic, but gentle-hearted, in response to the anti-Catholic stories she grew up with as an Adventist.
So Shirley, when trying to come up with personalities, drew on personalities with whom she was already familiar, even if they weren't very detailed. It was Schreiber who said they had to be more distinct for the book, and Wilbur who needed them to exist in order to protect Shirley from abuse.
In the movie there's a scene where Sybil "confesses" to Wilbur that she's made all these personalities up, that she's not really suffering from MPD. The doctor stands firm: the therapy is working, and that's what makes it scary enough for a false confession. In the movie, the scene is more proof of Wilbur's competence as a doctor and you cheer for her to keep going. In reality, according to Nathan's book, Sybil did indeed write a letter to Wilbur confessing that it was all a lie and Wilbur did indeed dismiss it as a way to avoid confronting the worst memories. But if you actually read the letter, Shirley isn't trying to get out of therapy, she's begging for therapy to explain why she got herself into this lie. Doctor Wilbur's dismissal, so heroic in the movie, becomes positively chilling. She tells Shirley, in not so many words, that her choices are to either continue to be MPD and come up with abuse stories, or lose Wilbur's interest. (Wilbur by that point is pretty much Shirley's only financial support.)
Sybil Exposed isn't so much the story of a hoax as it is the story of an incredibly weird codependent relationship between two women who had disastrous effects on each other. Shirley has an almost bottomless need for maternal affection tapped into by Dr. Wilbur. Dr. Wilbur has an unhealthy fondness on "saving" people who are dependent on her motherly care. As a med school teacher she became notorious for encouraging a group of med students who adored her as boss, teacher AND therapist. A shockingly high percentage of those students went on to lose their medical license due to--guess what?--inappropriate relationships with patients! Then there’s their uneasy relationship with Schreiber, who battles with Wilbur on 70s talk shows, two elderly ladies in OTT evening wear wrestling each other for the spotlight while Dick Cavett looks on.
As I was reading about this relationship, which went on for over a decade and I don't think can ever truly be understood by anyone but the people in it, I also found myself thinking about OrangeblossomOB/Abbey's recent blog post detailing her years with Jordan Wood, both of them creating a similar fiction of multi-dimensional crisis that fulfilled some emotional need in everyone involved. Even when you hear the “real story” you can’t ever feel like you get it if you weren’t in that shared headspace.
I don't if this is interesting at all if you haven't heard of Sybil, but I do recommend the classic TV movie. Apparently it was remade with Jessica Lange at some point and I didn't even know, but it's just not the same if it's not the classic tale of multiple personalities and endlessly weird, torturous child abuse.
The pajamas in this clip got them sued on homophobic grounds!
Before I get to that, I had one of those things this week when a couple of things seemed to happen that commented on something I was reading and thinking myself. And it's very much related to fandom things.
I'll start with last week's Community, which as you've probably heard (hopefully not entirely from Community fans that annoy you!) is being put on hiatus. There were a bunch of comments about last week's episode, in which the Dean tried to make a commercial for Greendale college, with Abed also making a documentary about the process because, as Abed and Luis Guzman both agree Hearts of Darkness (the documentary on the making of Apocalypse Now) is much better than Apocalypse Now. The ep has naturally spawned really interesting meta about the process of having stories and how the stories create reality, because they are a way for people to explain their experience of something via emotion.
I was particularly eager to think about that because of a book I've been reading, Sybil Exposed by Debbie Nathan. Perhaps you already know Sybil, because she was a huge cultural phenomenon in the 1970s. She was the subject of the "nonfiction novel" Sybil by Flora Schreiber, which told the story of Sybil Dorsett, a woman with 16 personalities who was cured via therapy with her brilliant, caring psychiatrist, Cornelia "Connie" Wilbur. The book was huge and later was made into an awesome TV movie with Joanne Woodward (who once herself starred as multiple personality Eve in The Three Faces of Eve) and Sally Field, who until then was known for her goofy sitcoms.
I hadn't realized, since when I read/saw Sybil in high school it was years after either came out, was that Sybil essentially created the modern understanding of multiple personality/dissociative identity disorder, and the idea of repressed memories brought out through therapy. That, of course, eventually peaked in the 90s with thousands of people diagnosed with the disorder (before Sybil it wasn't even in the DSM) without half the symptoms described in the book, and many therapists sued when the memories they recovered turned out to be completely false.
Memory, it turns out, doesn't work like a Pensieve.
Our heads our not filled with objective movies that store our entire life if we could only access it. In Sybil Exposed Nathan puts together her own story of Sybil (real name Shirley Mason), Connie and Flora Schreiber, using transcripts and records and interviews with people who knew them. I don't want to call Nathan's story the 'true story' since she, too, is making her own story out of events and facts and understanding them through her own beliefs and trying to make a linear narrative. But it certainly brings out real things about the whole story that are clearly important.
Like the fact that Wilbur very much appeared to pre-diagnose Shirley with MPD, which she was already interested in, broke every ethical guideline for analysts, fed her enough powerful drugs to make Shirley incapable of supporting herself, asked Shirley leading questions while she was high on pentothal, never found evidence for anything she said, and had a big history of doing experiments that validated her preconceived ideas. She also, btw, wrote a book on homosexuality being a mental illness that came (like most things, in her view) from having a terrible mother. When she died she’d spent a long time pushing MPD as a serious disorder and was considered an expert on it.
So, putting out there that this book gets really dark in case you're put off by that, but it's also fascinating in dozens of ways, and I'm going to concentrate on one of them, which is that all three of these women happened to be women for whom lying/truth-stretching was an important part of their lives.
Schreiber was a freelance writer who'd long learned to fake "real stories" to illustrate some of her articles, using the tools of fiction to present true stories. (This one's particularly significant to me since my own job is exactly that, using the tools of fiction to present real stories, but we have a much stronger devotion to facts than Flora.)
Connie Wilbur spent years doing experiments in overcrowded mental hospitals without control groups or double-blind protocol and vague definitions of "better" or "worse." Shirley as the child of strict Seventh Day Adventists who at the time considered all fiction or make believe was a sin, and grew up terrified she was going to hell for her fantasies about imaginary friends. One story that's got to be upsetting for anyone in fandom: as a little girl Shirley cut out words and letters from magazines and hid them under her dolls. When alone she used the letters to write stories on the floor hoping that they weren’t' really stories if they could later be swept up and turned back into jumbled letters! Shirley's active imagination often led her to have fantasies about things like winning art contests or being present at the death of a boy she read about at the paper. I know I've done the same thing plenty of times. With Shirley, however, there's evidence of her actually telling other people about these things and presenting them as facts. It's unclear whether she actually came to believe they were real after years of telling them to herself.
So Sybil in the end, sort of becomes layer upon layer of stories built on a small collection of facts and I wound up just getting so into the way they fit together. For instance, the movie changes things from the book. The book changes things from the actual years of therapy between Connie and Shirley. The therapy itself was in large part Sybil and Connie creating a fiction together. These fictions are all adjusted to fit different audiences--Connie wanted stories of abuse and multiples; Sybil was desperate to give Connie anything she wanted; Flora Schreiber said the public needed fully developed personalities and a happy ending. There's something really cool when you can follow something through all the layers we have, watching it change like in a game of telephone.
I'm going to just stick to one example because the whole book's full of them, but for instance: Sybil's earliest personalities were Peggy Ann, Peggy Lou, Vicky and Mike. These were the first personalities Sybil claimed to have, and while none of them were really alters, they did all come from her life. As a child her mother (who didn't abuse her) used to sometimes call her Peggy Lou/Peggy/Peggy Ann when she thought she looked cute. Little Shirley would then act saucy, which was "in character" for Peggy and her mother would laugh. In winter her father would let her hang around his workshop. He'd dress her in overalls and a cap for the cold, and since that's what boys wore in the 20s, he'd jokingly call her Mike. Finally Vicky was Shirley's imaginary friend who she made up--Vicky was a Catholic, but gentle-hearted, in response to the anti-Catholic stories she grew up with as an Adventist.
So Shirley, when trying to come up with personalities, drew on personalities with whom she was already familiar, even if they weren't very detailed. It was Schreiber who said they had to be more distinct for the book, and Wilbur who needed them to exist in order to protect Shirley from abuse.
In the movie there's a scene where Sybil "confesses" to Wilbur that she's made all these personalities up, that she's not really suffering from MPD. The doctor stands firm: the therapy is working, and that's what makes it scary enough for a false confession. In the movie, the scene is more proof of Wilbur's competence as a doctor and you cheer for her to keep going. In reality, according to Nathan's book, Sybil did indeed write a letter to Wilbur confessing that it was all a lie and Wilbur did indeed dismiss it as a way to avoid confronting the worst memories. But if you actually read the letter, Shirley isn't trying to get out of therapy, she's begging for therapy to explain why she got herself into this lie. Doctor Wilbur's dismissal, so heroic in the movie, becomes positively chilling. She tells Shirley, in not so many words, that her choices are to either continue to be MPD and come up with abuse stories, or lose Wilbur's interest. (Wilbur by that point is pretty much Shirley's only financial support.)
Sybil Exposed isn't so much the story of a hoax as it is the story of an incredibly weird codependent relationship between two women who had disastrous effects on each other. Shirley has an almost bottomless need for maternal affection tapped into by Dr. Wilbur. Dr. Wilbur has an unhealthy fondness on "saving" people who are dependent on her motherly care. As a med school teacher she became notorious for encouraging a group of med students who adored her as boss, teacher AND therapist. A shockingly high percentage of those students went on to lose their medical license due to--guess what?--inappropriate relationships with patients! Then there’s their uneasy relationship with Schreiber, who battles with Wilbur on 70s talk shows, two elderly ladies in OTT evening wear wrestling each other for the spotlight while Dick Cavett looks on.
As I was reading about this relationship, which went on for over a decade and I don't think can ever truly be understood by anyone but the people in it, I also found myself thinking about OrangeblossomOB/Abbey's recent blog post detailing her years with Jordan Wood, both of them creating a similar fiction of multi-dimensional crisis that fulfilled some emotional need in everyone involved. Even when you hear the “real story” you can’t ever feel like you get it if you weren’t in that shared headspace.
I don't if this is interesting at all if you haven't heard of Sybil, but I do recommend the classic TV movie. Apparently it was remade with Jessica Lange at some point and I didn't even know, but it's just not the same if it's not the classic tale of multiple personalities and endlessly weird, torturous child abuse.
The pajamas in this clip got them sued on homophobic grounds!
