‘”What about mamma?” The woman psychiatrist asks her patient, another woman, who is lying on a divan in the early 1960s. “What about mamma been doing to you, dear? I know she’s given you the enemas,” the psychiatrist continues. “And filled your bladder up with cold water, and I know she used the flashlight on you, and I know she stuck the washcloth in your mouth, cotton in your nose so you couldn’t breathe…What else did she do to you? It’s all right to talk about it now.”
“My mommy,” the patient answers groggily. She is in a hypnotic trance, induced with the help of the psychiatrist.
“Yes.”
“My mommy said I was bad, and…my lips were too big…she slapped me…with her knuckles…she said don’t tell Daddy. She said to keep my mouth shut.”
“Mommy isn’t going to ever hurt you again,” the psychiatrist answers. “Do you want to know something, Sweety? I’m stronger than mother.”‘
These are the opening lines of Sybil Exposed by Debbie Nathan a book about the three (or 
nineteen) women behind one of the most famous multiple personality cases in history.
Meet Shirley A Mason from Dodge Center, Minnesota: artist from a young age, only child in a devout Seventh-Day Adventist family with a nervous, controlling mother. This is the young woman who would later claim to have sixteen different personalities while in the care of the famous Dr. Connie Wilbur.
Sybil Exposed takes you through Shirley’s life, Dr. Wilbur’s psychiatric practices and the writing career of Flora Schreiber, author of Sybil. The book tells the story of how these three women meet and end up in business together to create the cultural phenomenon of Sybil.
You the reader get to decide if Shirley really did indeed suffer from multiple personalities or if these women were only out to get their own.
by Zita
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