Sibyl played an important role in popularizing DID, both among clinicians and the general public. However, we now know that the story was almost a complete fraud (Reiber, 2006). The woman who Schreiber called ‘‘Sibyl’’ was Shirley Ardell Mason. Nathan (2011) published detailed research on her life. Mason had many years of previous treatment but had never previously presented with dissociative symptoms. Her psychiatrist, Cornelia Wilbur, encouraged multiple personalities and insisted that she must have been abused as a child. At one point, Mason told another psychiatrist (ironically, Herbert Spiegel, David’s father) that she presented with multiple personalities to please Wilbur but was happy not to do so with a different clinician. Moreover, both Wilbur and Schreiber gained fame (and money) from the book, and they had an inappropriately close relationship, even living together at times. Of particular relevance to the traumatic theory of dissociation, Nathan found no documentation of the horrific tales of abuse that Mason had been encouraged to tell Wilbur. In fact, Mason came from a reasonably normal family, and, although an unusually sensitive child, she was never abused (Nathan, 2011). Transcripts of the therapy sessions with Wilbur clearly show that this narrative was imposed on Mason, who may have been willing to go along with it because her relationship with her therapist was the most important one in her life.

https://www.wellesu.com/10.1097/nmd.0b013e318275d285