Volume 44, Number 7 · April 24, 1997
Sybil—The Making of a Disease: An Interview with Dr. Herbert Spiegel
By Herbert Spiegel, Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen
Only seldom can we date the emergence of a psychiatric syndrome with such precision: Multiple Personality Disorder (or MPD, as it is known to psychiatrists) was born in 1973 with the publication of Flora Rheta Schreiber's book Sybil.[1] Not that Sybil was the first book ever devoted to a case of multiple personality, far from it: Sybil belongs in fact to a well-established genre that includes, among others, Théodore Flournoy's From India to the Planet Mars (1899), Morton Prince's The Dissociation of a Personality (1906), Corbett H. Thigpen andHervey Cleckley's The Three Faces of Eve (1954)—not to mention Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886). But Schreiber's book was, as Ian Hacking points out,[2] the first one that firmly tied multiple personality to child abuse, a notion that had gained widespread recognition in the 1960s and that was to become an essential feature of present-day Multiple Personality Disorder. As the psychiatrist Frank W. Putnam writes in his authoritative textbook on MPD: 'It was not until the 1970s, that the first reports clearly connecting MPD to childhood trauma began to appear in single case histories. Among the first and best-known was the case of Sybil, treated by Cornelia Wilbur and dramatized by Schreiber.'[3]
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