the totally insane true story behind the 1970s film and book Sybil

Sunny, that is super fucked up. But it's way worse to be Sybil's mom than it is to be Sybil. Sybil's mom supposedly took many public dumps, had lesbian orgies in the woods with underage girls, and administered punitive enemas to Sybil while she was suspended from the kitchen's light fixture. (It is highly unlikely and completely unconfirmed by multiple firsthand witness interviews with people who knew her personally and intimately). So no harm done in the long run amirite?

EIII please do

who did that art, anyway?

I haven't taught a single Sybil in 15 years--I don't think I've even known one in my entire life. Like Adolf, it's a name that seems to have fallen out of favor.

Tears For Fears, named their album, 'Songs From the Big Chair', after a phrase used in the 1976 movie. In fact the track 'Big Chair' was inspired by 'Sybil' and the fact she felt safe in the big chair in her therapist's office.

is there a good precis on any of this stuff available anywhere (relevant wiki entry?), so far this thread is p much elliptically the same as the catholic church thread

Her real name is Shirley Mason
This is her
http://i.cdn.turner.com/trutv/trutv.com/graphics/photos/criminal_mind/psychology/multiples/3-3-Sybil-Shirley-K-Mason.jpg

Dr Cornelia Wilbur is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornelia_B._Wilbur

I haven't taught a single Sybil in 15 years--I don't think I've even known one in my entire life. Like Adolf, it's a name that seems to have fallen out of favor.

― clemenza, Monday, July 30, 2012 10:25 AM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I really like it! I think someone should bring it back.

Flora Schreiber's NYT obit http://www.nytimes.com/1988/11/04/obituaries/flora-schreiber-70-the-writer-of-sybil-and-of-shoemaker.html

One perspective on Satanic Ritual Abuse http://www.religioustolerance.org/sra.htm/

ty LL
i figure this is maybe also useful http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satanic_ritual_abuse
if not wrt this then just to keep as a pinned tab on the next library computer you use

while she was suspended from the kitchen's light fixture.

I feel like light fixtures cannot actually withstand this? I guess it depends.

xp - yes, indeed. i can't wait for my friends and family to see my amazon wish list when they buy me birthday presents this year.

here is the most well known of shirley mason's paintings

http://www.hiddenpaintings.com/uploads/Entrapment_s.jpg

laurel, she was a slight child

I don't think there's a single sum-up but there are a lot of individual books & documentaries that I basically can't resist every time I see one

That's why I wanted to read Debbie Nathan's book. I think it is that book.

Satan's Silence

I mean who can resist SATAN'S SILENCE?!

i read "sybil exposed" too and it is nuts

http://www.youtube.com/embed/6pdRbfVLO6g

Worst Mother in Film: Now with Laugh Track!

1973 Nervous Breakdown is a far better book but this goes deep into the culture-wide dread that fueled the satanic ritual abuse epidemic

http://ebooks-imgs.connect.com/product/400/000/000/000/000/087/529/400000000000000087529_s4.png

Jenkins also wrote a book about cults - Mystics & Messiahs - but it's not that great. he's kind of neo-conservative and middlebrow, a bad combo

I used to listen to this dude's comedy albums when I was a Christian, he is a pathetically tragic figure in the whole Satanic Panic era, being mostly a fraud who was exposed by a Christian magazine, Cornerstone.

man, "Unsolved Mysteries" and "20/20" were obsessed with satanic panic

Warnke's exposure in Cornerstone is one of the all-time great moments in evangelical culture, so amazing

Although I am now more than two decades removed from it, I remain fascinated by the ephemera of evangelical culture. Warnke, Bob Larson, Carman, Mylon LeFevre, DeGarmo & Key, Kerry Livgren's A/D . . . endlessly amazing stuff.

Oof that's a good story. I love fallen frauds, esp if they had followers.

I just want to clarify that there were clearly other factors influencing the Satanic panic/MPD mania of the 80s/90s, BUT a major foundation of the argument supporting it came from the research and promotion of Dr Cornelia Wilbur, who started the "repressed sexual childhood memories" aspect that formed the foundation of SRA evidence.

aero we should start a thread on ILM on CCM music of the 80s/90s. Wonder how many people would participate?

I'd be in.

(I remember Warnke clearly. btw...saw him live at least twice. Had already secularized myself by the time Cornerstone blew the lid off his "ministry," though.)

I was not a Christian, so I don't know anything about that music at all. Kinda freaks me out tbh.

I would like a signet paperback covers thread.

My parents used to get all these Christian music mailorder catalogs and I would read them cover-to-cover the same way I would w/ Columbia House & BMG and the one thing that always astounded me was that Petra had a seemingly endless discography and yet I have never, ever heard their name mentioned anywhere other than those catalogs.

Are there any threads about 60s-70s hippie Jesus folk-rock?

My 7th gr math teacher had a daughter who loved Petra! That is the only way I ever heard the name.

WmC, I think so -- it's a hot commodity among collectors iirc?

Private labels, small pressings, etc

as is generally known I am the biggest Amy Grant fan on ilx

Contemporary Christian Music: 70s, 80s, 90s and beyond

wow, this is something http://www.jesus-is-savior.com/False%20Religions/Wicca%20&%20Witchcraft/anton_lavey.htm

Kinda want to see Amy Grant get in a boxing ring against somebody and see if the the combo of aero's 2 biggest fandoms makes him essplode.

As long as she doesn't fight that dude from Bulgaria in the Olympics bout from Saturday. That guy was fierce.

Had no idea Sybil had been debunked!

My step-mother had all these books. She was an Irish Catholic who had lost a son to crib death. I remember Helter Skelter, The Eyes of Laura Mars, these book covers with slack-jawed children being threatened by some sinister being above the book title. So many Stephen King books…

She made a mean cheese dip, I do give her that.

I am seriously looking forward to seeing people's "Sybil's been debunked!" reactions!!

There's even a major point that I will not mention because you will just have to read the book.

Unless someone injects me with powerful substances and elicits the information from me, that is.

All that's missing from that Anton LaVey thing is a connection to Jack the Ripper and the Knights Templar. They've got everything else.

what was nuts to me was how long and completely symbiotic the relationship was between the doctor and "sybil." like this was something that went on for decades, and they were totally dependent on each other. also some pretty serious self-deception going on on both sides - they both had to be aware that there was fakery going on, but i don't think either thought they were doing something wrong or cynical or self-serving.

right -- like with all the hospitals they worked at together, and how she got sybil all these jobs as an art therapist, and encouraged her to go to school to be a psychiatrist?!

they went on vacations together

Michelle Remembers is so weird to read now, so much of it is like “I’m sorry WHAT” but i guess because it’s written in that naive style of Go Ask Alice that it completely sucked people in

and that psychiatrist is very O_o

i’ll def watch this doc!

Felt sorry for his family (ex-wife, daughters) watching this. Some well-known Canadian media people got sucked in too.

I read it for a "Literature and Psychology" class in college ca. 1987. I really can't remember whether we even questioned the authenticity of the story. I think the professor might have just tossed it into the "literature" (fiction) bin with the rest of the works, all of which were unquestionably fiction (e.g., Dostoyevsky's The Double, Anne Tyler's Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant). At any rate, we discussed MPD as a real pathology.

We also read The Fall, which has stuck with me more than any other book from that class.

"satanic ritual abuse" is just a cover-up for christian ritual abuse, which we're not allowed to talk about

Feels like SRA is rearing its horns again with the Qanon/adrenachrome/Wayfair bullshit

That's exactly how the film ends, with Pizzagate and Qanon: it is happening again.

I never heard of this case (probably because it’s Canada) but I was amused by this detail of her alleged story:

an 81-day ritual in 1955, that supposedly summoned Satan himself and involved the intervention of Jesus, the Virgin Mary, and Michael the Archangel, who removed the scars received by Smith throughout the year of abuse and blocked memories of the events "until the time was right".

Last specific I'll cite, because I want people to see the film, but part of disproving her story was going back to her school photos in 1955, where she appears way too normal--and seemingly physically fine--for someone going through all this. (And attending school regularly during the window of her abduction.)

that looks awesome, just read up about this. Whatever happened to her? Her psychiatrist/husband is dead now.

She's still alive but declined to be interviewed for the film.

xxp I actually knew a couple punkers who worked at that DC pizza place years ago

And I think there was a video circulating of Ian Svenonius wearing a hooded robe at that pizza parlor, trying to summon Curtis Mayfield's ghost or something like that... might have added to the shooter's suspicions about the place

I had thought the concept of recovered memories was controversial within the research psych community because there was evidence that many of these were false memories?

― stank viola (Neanderthal)

idk. it's interesting. i didn't think repressed memories were a real thing either until i found out that i had them.

to be clear i wasn't ritually abused by a satanic cult or anything like that. there were just things that it was easier to... not think about for a while. then in my 40s i started dealing with gender stuff and i was like... why has none of this ever come up before?

and then i realized it had. again, we're not talking about anything wild or outrageous. i had friends who were like "oh yeah, i remember you telling me something like that", when in my head i'd told no-one my secret. it was easier to not think about it, to compartmentalize it somewhere out of the way. there was nothing i could do with that information, no useful purpose it could serve.

for some people their past is a rational logical narrative and for me, i've been told so many different things, some of which aren't true, by people i learned to trust that... it's confusing what to believe sometimes. i kind of try to piece things together from fragments of things i remember, and sometimes i put it together wrong, i draw conclusions that aren't correct, i misremember. i guess it's easy to categorize them as "false memories", i'm trying to figure things out and i do it wrong. and then when i do sometimes people will say "see, you're always remembering things wrong", and dismiss everything i remember, but i'm not "always" remembering things wrong. sometimes one person remembers things one way and me and my sibs all remember things in a very different way.

sometimes... one is pressured to believe a narrative that doesn't hold up to scrutiny if you examine it. and that narrative can be satanic ritual abuse, or it can be "perfectly normal child".

I like your last paragraph a lot there...You should look for this film. I think you would, at the very least, agree that this particular case was fraudulent.

i haven't seen the film, but from what i've read i have no doubt of that... i guess what i'm interested in is the way that narratives of "satanic" or "occult" abuse are perpetrated by hegemonic institutional forces (in this case mainly christianity) while at the same time genuine instances of abuse perpetrated by these same institutional forces is dismissed as indicative of things like "false memory syndrome". particularly given the tendency christianity has to portray queerness as demonic! i'm thinking here of things like the D&D panic ignited by the disappearance of james dallas egbert iii. his parents hired a pi named william dear to investigate the case... dear says that egbert's disappearance has a lot more to do with his homosexuality than dungeons and dragons...

that said dungeons and dragons is something that does have great resonance with queer people... one of the things parents found most dangerous about dungeons and dragons was the way it encouraged its players to take on alternate personae... it's extremely common for players to use this as a way of exploring sexual or gender identities that would otherwise be taboo. d&d is a tremendously queer game today, and has spawned explicitly queer successors like "thirsty sword lesbians".

one can also see the way something like "false memory syndrome" was created by paul mchugh, the conservative catholic who shut down the gender affirming surgery program at johns hopkins because of his personal beliefs... personal beliefs which then led him to defend vigorously priests accused of the serial sexual assault of children, a crime which was covered up by the ecclesiastical hierarchy...

this sentence from lawrence pazder's wikipedia page stood out to me...

Pazder considered himself to be a devout Catholic.

the archbishop of portland earlier this year issued an edict forbidding teachers in catholic schools in portland from calling trans kids by their names or gendering them correctly... christians call us "groomers" when the actual people abusing children are far more often youth pastors... christianity's long, shameful legacy of child abuse continues, all the while claiming to "protect children".

hail satan. baphomet is goals.

SATAN WANTS YOU (the Michelle Remembers doc) is 100% worth the rental on prime. Debbie Nathan is in it!!
Well made and the ending satisfies. When someone besides me watches it we can discuss "baby candles"

Oh thank you thank you will totally watch

I assumed this thread was bumped because of the growing popularity of the multiplicity online subculture! Whenever I see someone talking about their supposed dissociative identity disorder I can’t help but think about my fascination with Sybil when I was a teenager.