Shirley Ardell Mason - Controversy

Controversy

Mason's diagnosis has been challenged. Psychiatrist Herbert Spiegel saw Mason for several sessions while Wilbur was on vacation, and felt that Wilbur was manipulating Mason into behaving as though she had multiple personalities when she did not. Spiegel suspected Wilbur of having publicized Mason's case for financial gain. According to Spiegel, Wilbur's client was a hysteric, but did not show signs of multiple personalities; in fact, he later stated that Mason denied to him that she was "multiple", but claimed that Wilbur wanted her to "be" people. Spiegel confronted Wilbur, who responded that the publisher would not publish the book unless it was what she said it was.

In August 1998, psychologist Robert Rieber of John Jay College of Criminal Justice challenged Mason's diagnosis, claiming she was instead an "extremely suggestible hysteric" and also stated he believed Wilbur had manipulated her in order to secure a book deal. In a review of Rieber's book Bifurcation of the Self, Mark Lawrence asserts that Rieber repeatedly distorted the evidence and left out a number of important facts about Mason's case, in order to advance his case against the validity of the diagnosis.

Debbie Nathan's Sybil Exposed draws upon an archive of Schreiber's papers stored at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and other first-hand sources. Nathan describes the purported manipulation of Wilbur by Mason and vice versa, going into personal detail about the lives of Mason, Wilbur and Schreiber. Nathan ascribes Mason's physical and sensory issues to a lifelong case of pernicious anemia but mistaken at the time for psychogenic symptoms caused by stress. Nathan claims that Wilbur and Mason knowingly perpetrated a fraud. She cites a well-known 1958 letter by Mason (which is reprinted in Sybil) in which she claimed to pose as a multiple for attention and excitement. Nathan claims Schreiber wrote Sybil based on stories coaxed from her during therapy, and that this case created an "industry" of repressed memory. The case remains controversial. Although Wilbur's papers were destroyed, copies and excerpts within the Flora Rheta Schreiber Papers at the Lloyd Sealy Library of John Jay College were unsealed in 1998.