SHIRLEY MASON (1923 – 1998) was the real name of the woman who the world would come to know as SYBIL, back in the 1970’s.

Shirley was brought up as an only child in rural Minnessota in the United States. Her parents were strict Seventh Day Adventists – a religion that banned novels and short stories that young Shirley loved to read and write.

It’s alleged Shirley was assaulted and punished in the most cruel and horrific ways as a child and that her personality underwent a ‘psychic splitting’ as a result.

‘Pyschic Splitting’ – or Multiple Personality Syndrome (now known as Dissasociative Personality Syndrome) – can be explained as a coping mechanism that allows seperate personalities to develop in an attempt to share the burden of trauma among seperate ‘identities’.

As a young woman, Shirley Mason found herself confronting emotional instability. She sought psychiatric help and eventually linked up with Dr Connie Wibur (1908 – 1992) who practised in New York.

Shirley would go on to have no less than 11 years of pschotherapy sessions with Dr Wibur, beginning in 1954, and develop the most extraordinary patient-therapist relationship.

What the book SYBIL EXPOSED points out is that prior to meeting Dr Wilbur, Shirley Mason had no multiple personalities. It’s alleged that through highly suggestive questioning and a variety of other techniques applied to a naive and vulnerable patient, Dr Wilbur had encourged these ‘alters’ to emerge.

In 1958 – four years into her therapy – Shirley wrote a letter to her psychiatrist. It began with Shirley admitting she was “none of the things she had pretended to be.”

“I am not going to tell you there isn’t anything wrong with me”, the letter continued, ” but it is not what I have led you to believe. I do not have any multiple personalities. I do not even have a double. I have been essentially lying”.

The rest of the letter laid out Shirley’s belief that she had been misdiagnosed and her admission that she had played along with the error.

She also recanted much of her childhood abuse claims, now explaining that while her mother had been anxious and overly protective and her parents had scolded her in an attempt to cure her of her ‘funny’ ways, the claims of childhood rape, torture and being strung up with ropes were mere fictions.

Connie Wilbur the psychiatrist read the letter and knew straight away she had a problem on her hands. Shirley Mason was not just the most important patient on her books but the most important patient in her entire professional career, not to mention the history of psychiatry up to that point.

Connie had already been discussing her patient with her psychiatry students at the University where she lectured. She also spoke about the case at conferences and with other renown psychiatrists. She had no wish to give this up.

Connie told herself that Shirley’s recantation letter was merely a form of ‘resistance’. It was the ego’s attempt to trick itself into thinking it didn’t need therapy. She set about convincing her star patient that she did need therapy, badly. The fact she was now denying she’d been tortured by her mother, she told Shirley, showed she really HAD been tortured.

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