Volume 20, Number 10 · June 14, 1973
Crazy Mixed-up Kids
By D.W. Harding
Sybil
by Flora Rheta Schreiber
Regnery, 359 pp., $8.95
Soul Murder: Persecution in the Family
by Morton Schatzman
Random House, 205 pp., $6.95
The multiple personality thriller is on its way to becoming a standard genre. Sybil provides material still more fascinating than The Three Faces of Eve and its successor, Strangers in My Body, and we can reflect with satisfaction that this modern use of psychiatric disorder for popular entertainment is much more compassionate and understanding than its eighteenth-century counterpart of visiting Bedlam to watch the antics of the lunatics. If we can accept the basic truth of this highly novelistic, sometimes novelettish, account, it has extraordinary interest both as a psychological document of a woman who is said to have had sixteen personalities and as a moving human narrative.
Review, 3220 words
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