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

i still love talking about sybil! so much in fact that i recorded a tiny (1 min) song inspired by her. i may record more. who am i to turn away when inspiration strikes? my most recent thoughts have been about Shirley Mason's art and the role art played in her life.

here is my song! https://tinyurl.com/rs8ku8t (it's a link to my soundcloud but i didn't want it to be searchable)

i am especially interested in the way she used art to process trauma.

i thought this was esp interesting:

"...The sensory experience of Mason's art may mirror the relative presence and absence manifest from the inner/outer shifting moments of selfhood, as different aspects of her subjectivity inhabit conscious control. Rather than visualize difference embedded in the visual forms and styles, as has often been noted, I ask the viewer to suspend such pronouncements. Instead, reflect upon the freshness of the experience of Mason's art; it is palpable when one confronts, through immersion, the vastness of this project. For this author the cohesiveness and integrative capacity, the traumatic experiences embedded in the art evoke certainly the stifling effects of splintering, but also much more, the congruent balance between difference, the potential self-acceptance, the healing action of and the promise of self reparation.

Another feeling from the work is a sense of urgency, of profound significance, struggling to be heard, seen and witnessed. There is a hallucinatory feeling after travelling through her work, again signalling the complex contradictions - the scream of silence and stillness. I increasingly found myself asking, where is Shirley Mason?

Mason's art is a living testament to resilience, determination and artistic legacy, in the face of unspeakable trauma. Vigilance pervades the work, searching for understanding, and the elusive comfort, amidst the sadness and poignancy of pain transcribed in every mark, in the affective traces of a hard-fought self-presence. The disquiet posits on of the enduring threads that permeate Mason's art, giving the viewer access to a reception of the empathic sensory experience of her life..."

- Geoffrey Thompson, American Art Therapy Association

more here:
https://hiddenpaintings.com/hidden-paintings

In latest dispatch from The Crime Lady (AKA Sarah Weinman, who has written about true crime and edited domestic suspense anthology, also d.s. box set for Library of America):
If you are not listening to the podcast You’re Wrong About — and if not, why not, it’s wonderful — they are doing a book club-in-progress on Michelle Remembers, the long out-of-print 1980 tome by Michelle Smith and her psychiatrist (and future husband) Larry Pazder, that was essentially the “Patient Zero” of the Satanic panic. I am beyond fascinated with this story, since it originated in Victoria, BC, and 40 years on, encapsulates everything about the panic in a single story.

ooooh

You're Wrong About again, which I found via the QAnon Anonymous podcast
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/human-trafficking/id1380008439?i=1000465289965

The "Taken" version of human trafficking doesn't exist.

Just noticed that Sybil Exposed is a $1.99 in the ebook stores rn

thanks for the tip!

worth every penny!!

Ha! I seem to recall you reading that upthread.

I started this thread

RIght. I knew that, sorry. Couldn't remember if you read this other book though until I scrolled up later#zingproblems.

I’m not salty 😀 I love this story and it’s one of the only threads I’m glad I started!!

Will read anything Debbie Nathan

seems like the whole 'grooming' thing is a 21st reboot of SRA

.. and of course, Wayfair shipping children in wardrobes

I have read all Debbie Nathan I could find! Has she written anything recently? (Haven’t checked in a while - I remember her being near the US/MX border for a while but idk if she wrote a book)

What is “the whole grooming thing”? Grooming is a real phenomenon (as are recovered memories tbh) but I’m not aware of it being co-opted?

It has been co-opted big time

That’s unfortunate. My appetite for bad news has been reduced by 200-300% since I started this thread so I’m not keeping very good track of the lunacy.

as are recovered memories tbh

Ehh...

I'm sure there are genuine instances of this, but the sordid phenomenon of the 80s-90s was pretty awful and really hurt a lot of innocent people

I’m aware. They’re still real for people who have blocked out actual abuse committed by people rather than Satan.

Okay, I going on in. You down with MPD? Yeah, you know me.

Sorry

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?

both things can be true at the same time -- they can be real (genuinely -- and yes, rarely -- experienced by people who have suppressed horrific unbearable memories of childhood abuse) and co-opted/exploited by people for their own purposes as detailed in this book and other reports.

Right

Sometimes I come across people who say they basically have no memory of their childhood. So maybe they have simply “forgotten,” but more likely they are suppressing something as they themselves would say. How to access that is another question. Of course other people who claim to remember something may be suppressing as well.

This seems like the right thread if I remember some of the earlier discussion (besides which, there's a clip of Sybil in the film): Satan Wants You, a documentary on I saw tonight on Michelle Remembers and the "Satanic panic" of the '80s.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y20TgJ_p_c8

It's Canadian, but the clip says it's coming to Tubi in a few months. What a sad and ridiculous story.

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.