Multiple Personality Disorder

Sarah tells Mike how pop culture created a two-decade-long obsession with multiple personality disorder and repressed memories. Digressions include Dead Poets Society, restless leg syndrome and the low editorial standards of the American publishing industry. The Satanic Panic makes a cameo appearance. 

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Transcript

Multiple Personalities

Sarah: As you recall, Norman Bates is the first great gay panic MPD character. 

Mike: Yes, and a major crush of mine, actually. 

Sarah: Oh God. Yeah, me too. 

Mike:  Not because of the murder stuff, just because of his facial structure.

So welcome to Your Wrong About, the show where we pull people, scandals, and events back from what people remember about them. 

Sarah: Ooh. 

Mike: It is not a great tagline. 

Sarah: I like that, it is like what we remember as a monster toying with truth and its claws like the crab in Moana. 

Mike: I am Michael Hobbes. I'm a reporter for the Huffington Post.

Sarah: I'm Sarah Marshall. And I'm a writer for The New Republic, and BuzzFeed, and The Believer, who I forgot about last week, but who I'm actually doing a fellowship with this fall or a writer in residency or some sort of ship. I'm going to be on a boat in Las Vegas.

Mike: The Las Vegas Navy, yes. 

Sarah: Yeah. I'm going to join the Navy.

Mike: And today we are talking about multiple personality disorder.

Sarah: Yeah. Which I'm very excited about. Michael, what do you remember about multiple personality disorder? Do you remember encountering that as a kid?  

Mike: Well because I know the premise of the show, I'm sure that all of my impressions will be absolutely correct. As a subset of my serial killer phase, of course MPD was always linked to the whole psychopath, sociopath, murderer thing. So I remember reading books about how, you know, different people would have 12 personalities within them. And one was a housekeeper, and another was like a CEO, and then some of them were men, and some of them were women. The one that I always loved was there'd always be one that speaks a foreign language. But it would always be like, “Oh, and she woke up and she couldn't speak English, but her German was totally impeccable, even though she had never taken a language class in her whole life.” 

Sarah: Well, and also you have this feeling of like, wow, that seems like the easiest way to learn German.

Mike: And then there was always this thing, too, that they wouldn't necessarily know what the other personalities were doing. That it was like you were this vessel and like Janine took over last night, and Janine had all these adventures and she's a sex worker. But then I woke up and I'm Emma. Emma is a small, bookish woman who just wants to play tennis with her friends that she doesn't know. Like it was always this thing of being sort of trapped and your body being taken hostage by these other people that are living inside you.

Sarah: Yeah. And that they were often in conflict with each other, and they would, you know, one personality would do something that the other one didn't like. The irony of course, is that they're all the same person. And I feel like something that was really frequent in pop culture depictions of multiple personality disorder and probably at least almost as frequent in real life was that women, 90% of the time, multiple personality disorder patients were women. 

Mike: Yeah. I keep saying she, because other than Primal Fear, I can't think of any male depictions. So, take us back, where does all of that begin?

Sarah: It begins at the movies. 

Mike: Really.

Sarah: One of the things that we found ourselves talking about a lot on the show, and also, we'll be talking about with multiple personality disorder is the way there are ideas that become like viruses. They're just ideas that we cannot resist, and multiple personality disorder is one of them. And so, this potent virus kind of reaches out into the world that the right kind of cocktail of ideas hits us at a time when we're most vulnerable to it. And this case, it seems as if there were some recorded cases in the past couple hundred years of people who manifested distinct personalities at different times, it was very rare. There had been a few dozen.

A book comes out in the 1950s called The Three Faces of Eve. It's a pseudonymous book and it describes a woman named Eve, who has two personalities, Eve White and Eve Black. And Eve White is a well-behaved housewife. And Eve Black is a slut. Because in the same way that men tend to have murderer personalities and our MPD narratives, women tend to have at least one slut personality. 

You see this over and over again in mid sanctuary in MPD stories that, you know, as a woman and mid sanctuary America, how can you have sex on purpose except to be a slut? 

Mike: Those are your only two options. 

Sarah: Yeah. There's just no way to have sex unless you have an alternate personality.

Mike: So this book is purporting to be a true story or its openly just a novel, a fictional account? 

Sarah: It's purporting to be a true story. It's a case history, but you could play really fast and loose with the truth during this time in American publishing. 

Mike: And also during now in American publishing is my understanding.

Sarah: Also, during now, right. I mean, but basically Eve has two personalities. She has the slut and the nice housewife. And the way the story goes is that the nice housewife doesn't know what the sluts been doing. This book comes out, it's popular, it's taken at face value. One of the things that The Three Faces of Eve and Sybil, both essentially pioneer for this kind of case history as a genre, is that at the end of The Three Faces of Eve, Eve Black and Eve White merge, they integrate, and they become a single person named Jane.  

Mike: I love that she gets a new name. She has to go to the DMV now and like update her information.

Sarah: Right. She can't be Eve Gray either. And anyway, the woman who inspired Eve later came forward and was like, I wasn't integrated, I still have different sides that do random shit. But the doctor was like, “Shhh”, because one of the conditions are publishing Sybil as well when it came along 15 years later, it had to have a happy ending. And the hallmark that comes in with Sybil is that multiple personality disorder comes from childhood drama. These are the two ideas that were introduced in American case histories of this time and the convention that we then see followed.

Mike: That sounds extremely familiar, you witnessed something terrible in your youth and it's like, then Tommy takes over or whatever. I remember that from these serial killer accounts.

Sarah: Right. The cultural narrative around Sybil, is this book comes out in 1973. It's about a woman who her identity would remain secret for another 30 years, she was called Sybil Dorsett in the book. And she was treated by a New York psychoanalyst named Dr. Cornelia Wilbur, which is her real name. And the book was written by Flora Rheta Schreiber. 

And the book chronicles, Sybil as this young woman living in New York and going to graduate school. And then she has these episodes, like she's just going about her day and then suddenly she wakes up and she's in a hotel room and she doesn't know what city she's in or how she got there. And she realizes she's in Philadelphia and she finds these child's pajamas that someone went out and bought. But you know, she can't have bought them because they're not in the right size for her and how did she get to Philadelphia? 

So she finds her old teenage psychiatrist, Dr. Wilbur, working in New York. She goes to see her, and they start doing therapy. And then one day Sybil shows up to see Dr. Wilbur as another personality. She says, I am Peggy Ann. And Dr. Wilbur is like, “Oh my God, Sybil is suffering from multiple personality disorders, a rare disorder. And since I have found one of the rare people who suffers from this disorder, I will study her.” 

And so what Dr. Wilbur quickly ascertains by having Sybil speak and guided imagery free associations is that she was the victim of horrible childhood abuse, physical and sexual abuse at the hands of her mother. And she goes to Sybil's hometown and looks around and finds all of this forensic evidence that the abuse really did take place like drawings that Sybil did while she was in prison, in the hayloft and things like that. And then comes back and Sybil in the meantime developed 16 distinct personalities.

Two of them are men, two of them have accents. Some of them are children, one of them is a baby. and Dr. Cornelia Wilbur decides that Sybil's personality fractured at the moment of childhood trauma and abuse. And the fact of her 16 personalities, therefore, can be taken as proof that she was so severely traumatized that was how many times she had to fracture. And by going back and recounting the memories of childhood abuse and reassessing them, Sybil will be able to integrate her 16 personalities, which is what they do. And then once Sybil is integrated, she is set free and can live happily for the rest of her life. That's a little bit like The Exorcist.

Mike: Right? I wonder how she integrated the baby. That sounds hard. 

Sarah: I wonder what integrating really is. And so Sybil comes out and immediately becomes a huge, best seller. It's serialized in a bunch of newspapers. So people are reading the story every week for six months.

Mike: Back when we serialized stuff in newspapers. Wow.

Sarah: Yeah. And immediately, it becomes just a cultural phenomenon. The author gets bushels of letters, almost all of them from American women and girls. And a lot of them write about feeling like they don't have multiple personality disorder, but they feel like they have all these different selves and different people they are at different times. And it's like, yeah, because being a woman in 1973 means that you in a very obvious way, sociologically are being torn between all of these positions in society. It's like, you want to be a good daughter, but you want to have sex and you want to maybe have a job or stay home and iron a little, I don't know. 

Mike: And probably a lot of unaddressed traumas too. I mean, probably a lot of the people had seen terrible things and we're still dealing with the trauma of it. And this gave them somewhat of a voice to their trauma or a lens through which to view their trauma that, you know, something happened to you that day and I'm still dealing with it because it's not like in 1973, society was great at being like, let's listen to people who say that they have trauma.

Sarah: Oh yeah. You know, in retrospect we put way too much energy into the space race, you know, because we were like, what's that you say, mental health? No, thank you. 

Mike: I am interested in the way that the idea of multiple personality gets laundered from one movie or two movies into an actual thing, because it sounds like the media was really taking this hook line and sinker, and then I'm imagining running with it, right. Probably writing magazine articles and finding their own examples. 

Sarah: Yeah. I feel like it was a little bit like the discovery of restless legs syndrome. Just like, doesn't everyone think they have restless leg syndrome.

Mike: I totally think that I had it. 

Sarah: Right. You're lying there, you can't sleep and you're like, ah, restless legs. No one had restless leg syndrome 15 years ago because no one had come up with such an all-encompassing and yet interestingly, vague term. Another thing I would add, I think one of the reasons that diagnosis resonated with people, is that it can also serve as actual, essentially forensic proof of childhood trauma or abuse.

Because if people are able to say, and guess what, they said it even more, maybe in 1973 than they do now, although we have no objective metric that, you know, well, you say you were abused, you say you were traumatized, you say you were raped, you say you're molested, but where's your proof.  You know, plot part of the plausible deniability for our ethicize and investigating or prosecuting or trying in any way to prevent rape is like, well, you know, who knows how real these allegations are. And so, if you have multiple personality disorder, you have essentially a way of clinically proving at least it seems for a while that you really were abused and maybe that you really were raped or sexually abused. You know, it's one of the rare forms of proof that you can offer.  

Mike: Is that a big part of the post-Sybil MPD conversation is a lot of other women coming forward and saying, hey, I have this too.

Sarah: It does, because what happens is the Sybil book comes out, that's huge. The Sybil movie comes out in 1977. It's a two-night TV movie event starring Sally Field. 

Mike: Oh, that was a TV movie?

Sarah: Yeah. It a really acclaimed one at one, a bunch of Emmys. It was on over two nights and TV movies were huge in the seventies. I mean, everyone in America watched Roots practically. And I would also like to add that Sally Field was Norma Rae, I think the year before Sybil came out and it's very frustrating to me that in a country that seems to be just doing whatever Sally Field does. We didn't just go one Sally Field movie over and be like, yes, unions, we were like, no, let's all get multiple personality disorder. At least we didn't all become flying nuns. But yeah, so the movie comes out 40 million Americans see it, which is one fifth the population. 

Mike: Wow. That is like dark side of the moon numbers, that is crazy.

Sarah: That's just a huge cultural impact. And so, it just becomes a phenomenon and then in the years after that, I have a quote, I have some numbers, “Until 1970 MPD was thought to be an exceedingly rare condition. Only 200 cases have been documented worldwide since the 17th century. From 1970 to 1980, there were about 400 reported instances of the disorder, 40 a year. But between 1980 and 1992, there were more than 5,000, that's 400 a year, 10 times the rate in the seventies.”

Mike: Wow. 

Sarah: And so what happens is that at the same time that this disorder gets huge, pop culture traction. It also is something that is becoming kind of a fad diagnosis in modern psychiatry because Cornelia Wilbur is a real doctor. She is very proud of her work with Sybil and that she has gone in and rescued this woman from a splintered ego and a completely dysfunctional life. You know, she's integrated her and made her well and other people want to make their patients well, I think people want to go and, and crusade and rescue somebody. Everybody wants to be a hero. So essentially one of the things that seems to happen is that psychiatrists go off and they go to these conferences and learn to recognize the signs of multiple personality disorder, and these are some of these are very vague. One of them is, you know, do you ever like zone out? Do you ever, you know, you're driving and they're like, oh, I don't remember making that turn. 

Mike: Oh no, that is like restless legs. That's like writing a horoscope, the thing that happens to everybody. 

Sarah: Yeah. And what happens is that women, mainly women start going into their psychiatrists and their psychiatrists start saying, you know, do you ever zone out, do you ever feel kind of disassociated from your memory? Do you ever feel like, you know, someone else's talking that like you contain just multitude in it selves essentially, and most, most people feel like they do?

Mike: Totally, yes. Who doesn't feel like that? That's that would be weird if you didn't feel like that.

Sarah: It would be, it would suggest that you had a lot that you were kind of repressing, honestly, like that would be a concern.

Mike: Yeah. Every single job interview I've ever had. I sort of feel like I blacked out during it, right. Because you have to be this job interview self, yeah.  If there's people who don't do that, I would like to meet them or maybe I wouldn't actually. 

Sarah: Yeah. We are socialized people in American families are socialized. Probably women to a greater extent are socialized than men. Typically, are socialized to intuit the emotional labor needs of the people around them, and then fulfill them. And the fact that women are 90% of the time, the patient's diagnosed with MPD during these years suggests that, you know, this is a diagnosis as addressing some of the cultural horrors of being a woman in America at this. Where you don't really have a stable sense of identity, partly because your identity is perhaps predicated on the person that you need to please, and whose expectations you need to live up to in a given moment. And that society forces you to kind of fracture into different selves for different people. 

Mike: I can see how many of the things that look like multiple personality disorder can also be depression or anxiety or border liners or any number of other things. This might've just been kind of the one that they got tested for first or the one that psychologists, mostly male psychologists I'm assuming, wanted to find in them.

Sarah: Yeah, or the ones that people were paying attention to in the moment. And I think also one of the attractions, one of the attractive things about multiple personality disorder from a clinician or a therapist standpoint, is that you integrate the person, you fix them at some point. There's nothing like that for depression, there is nothing like that for bipolar.

It's nothing like that for borderline and so people who were treated for multiple personality disorders, even if their therapists understood and communicated to them that, you know, oh, you might have symptoms of depression, you have anxiety. You have an eating disorder; they would not be treated for those things because the argument prevalent also at the time was that if you integrated the cells, if you treated the multiple personality disorder, then everything else would fall into place. This was the center of the rat king of disorder. And if you integrated the personalities, everything else would be fine. And so, it was also, you know, you could actually cure someone of something if you were treating them for multiple personality disorder, which you don't really get to do very much in mental health.

Mike: That's very appealing to psychologists.

Sarah: Yeah. You know, and then as a patient, it's a diagnosis you could be drawn to because you can be cured. It means that you're interesting. It means that you're rare, although increasingly, you know, throughout the nineties, less and less rare, really, but at least at the start you were.  So, it's just, you know, it's like this plumb diagnosis and people start getting it a lot. Because therapists want to have patients that have MPD, and patients want to have MPD and so a lot of people start getting it. 

Mike: That is gross to talk about it like that, or like gross to think about it like that, but it's totally true, right?

Sarah: Yeah. I feel like it's also important to think about how it's possible for people, you know, to say, well, you know, I think that this is what happened. This is my analysis of what happened, and I am also not accusing anyone of acting in bad faith. I don't think that any therapist woke up in the morning and rubbed their hands together and were like, I'm going to the defraud patients and insurance companies out of hundreds of thousands of dollars for this diagnosis that's mostly sociological trend. You know, maybe a couple of people did that, there's always outliers, but people don't act in bad faith to create these sociological epidemics. The reason we're so vulnerable to them is because we don't understand what we're doing. 

So as these diagnoses continue to proliferate, we really start to see them spiking in the late eighties, early nineties, and this also connects with the satanic panic, because there's kind of this three-pronged phenomenon where we have the satanic panic starting in the early eighties. There are the increasing diagnoses of multiple personality disorder. And the satanic panic is, you know, the center of that is allegations that roving bands of Satanists are going around and ritualistically abusing little children. And forcing them to eat babies and throwing them in pits full of snakes and sewing devil horns and tails on them and raising the dead and doing all sorts of things. 

At the same time that we're hearing these stories a lot and seeing all of these daycare sexual abuse hysteria cases, we're also hearing as the prevalent diagnostic approach to multiple personality disorder, that it probably follows some incident of childhood abuse, probably sexual abuse. Because we also have come to the conclusion, I think that sexual abuse is bar none the most traumatic form of child abuse by far because we're into ranking things at this time in America. And so, the self fractures to protect the self from trauma, what's the worst trauma childhood, sexual abuse.

And so, when we have people going in and being diagnosed with multiple personality disorder, quite often, the therapist also says, okay, well, that's probably a sign that you experienced some childhood sexual abuse. And there are even cases I've read about from this time of patients going in and saying, oh yeah, well I was molested on two occasions when I was growing up and describing them and the therapist saying, no, that's not traumatic enough.

Mike: No way.

Sarah: Dig deeper. You must've been molested in a more traumatic way. 

Mike: Oh shit. 

Sarah: And people being pushed to come up with greater and greater trauma and trauma that would justify their diagnosis and sometimes being pushed very explicitly in that direction by their therapists. And because of the other trends of the time coming up with memories of satanic ritual abuse, there was a case in which a woman who later sued her therapist created through guided imagery as she was conjuring repressed memories of the abuse. She must have suffered in order to develop multiple personalities, conjured a memory of her family, serving her a meatloaf made of human flesh and her therapist actually had it sent to a testing facility to see if it like had a meatloaf from her family sent to a testing facility.

Mike: Wait what, she actually brought in the meatloaf? What?

Sarah: Let me reread this and make sure I am getting the details, right, because this is a pisser. Okay, so this is an article from Chicago Magazine about a woman named Patricia Burgus, who sued her therapist after a diagnosis of multiple personality disorder and also the creation of false memories of her family's abuse.

“Of all the memories she once believed so fiercely growing up in a satanic cult, slaughtering babies, molesting children, what seems most ludicrous today is the memory of eating meatloaf that her father had made out of human flesh and daily therapy sessions with Braun, Pat often under hypnosis and sedated with medication began to recall experiences she had supposedly had in a satanic cult. Violent and bizarre incidents that became increasingly frightening until she finally thought she remembered that her parents, as members of the cult had practiced cannibalism. She claimed that her father, the manager of a Coca-Cola plant and a devout Roman Catholic would grind human remains into hamburger for meatloaf. Once Braun actually sent hamburger meat from Pat's families' picnic to be tested for human proteins at Rush’s lab, the results were negative. Years later the psychiatrist said in a sworn statement that those results didn't conclusively prove that Pat and her parents weren't cannibals. You don't have evidence one way or the other, because this may be the sample that didn't have human remains, he explained.” 

Mike: I mean, that epistemologically sounds to be fair, just because this meatloaf doesn't have people in it.

Sarah: Right. If we cannot independently prove that a meatloaf, that hamburger meat doesn't have human remains.

Mike: This might just be the people free meatloaf and not that people full meatloaf. 

Sarah: Like of all the meat of all the packages of hamburger they could have grabbed from the freezer that day, they happened to grab the non-human one and that doesn't prove anything.

Mike: Oh fuck. I was going to ask you about this whole repressed memory thing, because it seems like that's wrapped up in this.

Sarah: Yeah. The three prongs I see in this are satanic panic, multiple personality disorder diagnoses, and then the wave of repressed memories, which also builds and cross at about the same time as MPD.

Mike: I mean, I guess the repressed memories thing makes sense, because if you've got a bunch of multiple personalities and you don't know what all of them are doing, then it makes sense of that didn't happen to Tim that happened to Steve. It makes sense with the theory of multiple personality disorder that was prevalent at the time.

Sarah: It does. I mean, it really is the same basic principle because repressed memories, according to prevalent belief in the eighties and nineties, you witness or take part in something traumatic, you see your friend murdered, you're abused and your brain at the time that you're 3, 4, 5, however many years old. This originally starts off as a phenomenon that people observing childhood, but then it spreads to adults claiming to have repressed memories also.

Essentially, you can't handle it and you hide it away. You put it in a little oubliette and then years later something reminds you of it, or it pushes forward for some reason, and you experience it and integrate it. And the problem is that to me, the more persuasive argument is that repressed memories just don't exist. And Elizabeth Loftus is a psychologist who has written a lot about how memory actually functions, and her arguments and her experiments show that the idea of repressed memory is based on the idea of memory functioning, like a camera. I am in a shopping mall food court, and there's an open shooter situation. The way I would like to believe my memory works is that I take in all of this information, I see. You know, what different people are wearing, who falls when, you know, different aspects of this crime that I can, then when I give my statement to the police, be like, I remember seeing this and by having this mental image in my head, I'm accessing what was actually in front of me.

And the way, you know, the study is overwhelmingly experiments, overwhelmingly have found memory to actually function, is that we are continually recreating and forming new memories each time we access a memory. If I narrativize something that happened to me recently, a fight that I had with somebody. If I tell you about the mall shooting, and let's say, I talked to you right after I get my statement to the police, I will maybe believe that I'm accessing a copy or just seeing the same, you know, same version I told to the police, which is the same as the original. But I will be telling you a version of it influenced by the fact that time has passed.

It will be influenced by the fact that it was a traumatic event, which people tend to remember worse rather than better. The police may have suggested various ideas to me, which I then will have integrated into my image of what happened and will claim to have seen. I might have heard the account of another survivor on the news mentioning something that I didn't personally remember, but I will realize it must have been there and then it will feel like I've seen it and I will describe it to you. And then each time I access this memory or tell it or hear someone else tell it, it will change, and you can end up fairly easily while thinking you have the total truth with something that didn't happen. And something we are also vulnerable to as human beings is having a dream or having someone take us through guided imagery and having us bring up a few images from our subconscious and then talk about what they might represent happening to us.

Saying, well, you know, I saw this object and this object and if I free associate, that makes me think of being uncomfortable around my father in the back of the car. Does this mean that I'm being sexually abused by my father? And then the therapist can take me through it and say, okay, tell me about this memory of sexual abuse. What do you think? What happened? What do you think could have happened? When could this have happened? And if I say, well, it could have been when we drove to Mount Rushmore, blah, blah. You know, if I come up with a scenario then saying it will make it feel like it potentially did happen. A lot of allegations of crimes that later were beyond a reasonable doubt, scientifically, forensically, whatever objective criteria you want. There are cases in which someone was exonerated by the objective criterion of your choice, cases have unfolded this way. 

Mike: Right. I forgot to mention this in the Columbine episode, but this actually came up in Columbine that the principal of the school remembers that when he heard there was a shooter in the school, he said, “Oh, I was talking with a job applicant. We were in the middle of the interview, and then somebody burst into my office and said, ‘There's someone shooting up the school.’”  But then his secretary said, “No, I was with him when somebody told him there was a shooter, he was walking to lunch with me and somebody ran up and said, ‘There's a shooter in the school’.”

And so, like you said, even this sort of indelible memories, where were you when JFK was killed, these things that we should remember really clearly. We actually end up getting completely weird and contradictory and insane ideas about.

Sarah: Yeah. And I think even the more you try to access a memory, the more you narrativize it, the farther it can get away from the truth. Because each time you bring it out, yeah, it's like handling very old paper. 

Mike: There's also the thing too, that I noticed I do this sometimes where you're telling a story to somebody and sort of halfway through it, you realize it's not that good of a story or like, it's not that funny or whatever. 

Sarah: Oh yeah, I have that a lot and then I'm like, oh shit. 

Mike:  Yeah. And then you add stuff to it as you go, you're like a bear ran out of the woods or whatever. And then as you tell kind of that better version of the story, it gets more laughs or it gets more of a reaction or whatever that version of the story, the pumped-up version of the story becomes the canonical version.

Sarah: Yes. Like I have friends who, whenever they tell a story about something that I was involved in, I'm like, wow, I don't remember it happening that way but like it's funnier. Everyone is, you know, snappier, everyone has a good thing to say. Everyone has a little thing to do, like this is better.

Mike: There is also something weird about an expert, someone who you trust as an authority figure, sort of pulling these memories out of you and telling you, you know, I, an expert, believe in this concept that you can remember things, but really not remember them. And I'm telling you that this principle of repressed memories exists at the same time, I'm pulling these repressed memories out of you. It's sort of like people who tell you, you know, that I don't know, carbs are really bad for you at the same time. They say you should have a low carb diet. It's like they're giving you the information and the advice at the same time.

Sarah: I think one of our big themes on this show is the terror that can result when people don't recognize the power imbalance present in a situation and specifically that they have way more power than the people they're dealing with. We see this in senators questioning Anita Hill about well, but why would you do a favor for someone you didn't like who was, you know, relevant to your job and had hiring and firing power and could influence career trajectory for your whole life, like, why would you be polite to him? I don't understand. 

And the same thing here. Well, yeah, we are trained. We are brought up to believe authority figures in America, and the authority figures in America are judges and psychiatrists and doctors and lawyers. And the multiple personality, repressed memory, all of the criminal allegations, mostly of child abuse and child sexual abuse that resulted from this, cases that actually went to trial. 

Whether they resulted in convictions or not, that whole event came from people believing the authority figures in their lives, as they had been trained to do. They had therapists who said, well, it seems like you were sexually abused as a child, and they believed their therapists because we are brought up to believe doctors. It turns out that's not a great idea based on this. And also, the previous episode, doctors apparently will just as soon tell you to eat a whole head of lettuce for dinner every night, and that you were abused by Satanists as they will take your blood pressure. I don't know what to make of it.

Mike: So where did the legal cases come in? Do people start to use this as a defense, like an actual insanity defense?

Sarah: Actually, they do but much more. And especially in the eighties and nineties, we see cases where people diagnosed with multiple personality disorder, recover memories of childhood abuse, and often in the form of repressed memories, which don't exist. So therefore, in memories that, you know, maybe their memories that they disassociated from and that they retained some knowledge of, but just didn't feel like it was there as the same way that a multiple personality could be simply. You know, a side of you that you're disassociated from, you know, something that feels like not a part of you, but is not totally un accessible, doesn't speak Hungarian. 

I mean, another interesting thing that happens around this time is that there appears legislation starting in California that allows victims to press charges against an abuser within three years of recovering the memory of the abuse. I mean, tell me what you think about that.

Mike: So, the statute of limitations gets reset, but it's not from the time of the crime. It's from the time when you remember the crime, wow. 

Sarah: Yes. So what effect do you see that having?

Mike: Ooh, that's real bad. I mean, then you get a psychologist can just kind of talk you into, didn't your dad molest you, didn't he, didn't he, didn't he, and then you recovered the memory when you're 35 and then you have three more years to then accuse your father of molesting you.

Sarah: And also, you are incentivized to say, or to convince yourself that you recovered a repressed memory. Even if it is a real memory that you have always had, because if you always remembered being molested and you suddenly 10, 20 years later have the emotional support, the financial ability, the wherewithal, what have you, realize that it was a crime and that you can prosecute which many people grew up not knowing.

Talk about it with people after maybe growing up in a family that never talked about it. Something of that order, if that happens to you and you always remember being abused, that's too bad, the statute doesn't work for you. It has to be something that you have repressed and then remembered. So, it's a law that empowers those with alleged repressed memories, more than people who have always remembered suffering from abuse. So you're actually given privileges if you are part of the pop psychology wave.  

Mike: So that means a defense lawyer could actually get your case thrown out if they can prove that you remembered it, say seven years ago, like, oh, you actually wrote a letter to someone about your father molesting you seven years ago. So the statute of limitations has actually expired. 

Sarah: I think that could potentially be your best move as a defense attorney in one of those cases, if you had evidence of that, right. So then you as a defense attorney are able to harm the state's case by giving them further evidence 

Mike: That is so bad. 

Sarah: It's like a Bizarro Brady violation. 

Mike: No, no, he did molest her, but she remembered it the whole time. Boom case thrown out.

Sarah: Boom chucka lucka, yeah. And so we see therefore this proliferation of cases brought forward based on repressed memory evidence. And there is a historic case in the late eighties where a woman named Eileen Franklin claims to have, she was sitting on the couch, and she looked at her daughter and her daughter was about the age that Eileen's best friend had been when she disappeared from the neighborhood, and no one ever saw her again. And her body was found a few weeks later and Eileen looked at her daughter and suddenly, according to the way she later told the story, recovered all these memories of her father, you know, he was out in the car with her father and then they saw, Eileen's friend, Susan Nason, who later would disappear. And the dad picked her up and took them to a quarry or an abandoned area and raped Susan, and then killed her by smashing her head with a rock. Eileen suddenly recovered all these memories, and her father was tried and convicted of murdering Susan Nason based entirely on the evidence in his daughter's recovered memory.

Mike: Oh my God.

Sarah: And what later turned out to have been the case is that Eileen had created recovered, created, however you want to put it these memories while under hypnosis and had been guided through putting together these scenarios and that her father, as far as anyone can tell from, you know, evidence from testimony from the rest of the family had been abusive to his children. Had potentially molested them that's unclear, but it certainly seems very possible, but there's no evidence that he killed anyone. There's no evidence connecting him to the Susan Nason murder. 

And one of the facts that wasn't made available to the jury in the first trial, which is the reason that verdict was later overturned, is that they weren't told that all of the information Eileen Franklin recalled about the murder was information that had been on TV or in the newspapers. Everything she described was information that was available to her through the media. And so, there's nothing to suggest that this memory of her father was real aside from the willingness to believe in the time in repressed memories, which are something that it's hard to prove that something exists, it's hard to prove that it doesn’t exist. 

It's also, again, you know, one of the problems with all this pseudoscience that destroys lives and creates bad statutes is that it's law that's often attempting to protect women from abuse and violence. It just feels like the only way that we ever address the trauma that women face in life.

And the fact that the law has made no attempt to protect women proactively is, you know, we write these shoddy laws that are like, well, how about this other way to chip away at the rights of the defendant, that'll protect women, right? And it's like, no, no. Being able to convict people, you know, on less evidence, isn't actually going to make life better for women. We need to actually do something to diminish the odds that children are going to be the victims of child abuse when they're actually children. As opposed to taking all the teeth out of a lawyer's ability to advocate for his client when that person has gone to trial after already traumatizing a woman. You know, it's our response to atrocity in Americas is very focused on, well, we have to punish people as much as possible after the offend, but we can't protect their potential victims in any way. And it's just happenstance that the victims tend to be women and girls.

Mike: This reminds me actually, of a conversation that I had with a friend of mine years ago about her dad, who sounds like a just all-around total dick. And I remember in that conversation, she was telling me about all the kind of standard dickish dad things, just making terrible comments about her and about her looks and pushing her to do things she didn't want to do. And I remember at one point in that conversation, she said, I wonder if I'm repressing memories about him molesting me and it felt to me like this can be the kind of thing that you can use to just sort of amplify something of just someone who was terrible to you, but not in profound ways.

Like terrible to you in proportional ways, right. That one of the things we really struggle with is proportionality. That like this person is a dick, but he's not a child molester. We stopped short of these kinds of extreme things because this guy that did not murder the woman sounds like an all-around asshole, just not a murderer. And so, if somebody is an asshole, it can push you into this disproportionate evil. There's like a seed of assholery for these people, but then you push it farther than the facts warrant. 

Sarah: Yeah. It's personally been very difficult for me. I think it's difficult for everyone acknowledging that whatever trauma of whatever form you've been through in your life is enough to fracture you in the ways that you're fractured. And, you know, you can look back at your life and be like, wow, I have all of these issues and they came from what the true crime books would call an idyllic American childhood. Oh, well, you know, I guess this idea that we don't have the right to our trauma and it's such an unproductive and unhelpful idea because it's part of self-acceptance, you know, accepting that we are the way that we are because we're humans and we're fragile.

And we have a hard time with intimacy and loving each other and accepting ourselves and that's just the human condition. And you don't have to have been roasted on a spit by Satanists in order to hard time being a human being. But I think we really, we want there to be some reason far beyond us, some clearly definable reason for why we don't feel like we're enough or why we feel fractured or why we feel broken or whatever, but we're all just like that. You know, I feel like that's one of the great gifts of millennials is that everyone gives our generation so much shit, but it's like, isn't all we did was we just sort of showed up one day and we were like, wow, everything's hard and I hate it. And then everyone realized that everyone else felt that way.

Mike: I think that every show she'd come back to millennials are fixing it. 

Sarah: We are fixing it. We're doing our best because we're like, I don't expect to feel like a whole integrated person that's bougie. 

Mike: Yeah, because what happens to all this stuff? What's kind of the downfall of this trifecta? I mean, we already talked about satanic panic, but what's the downfall of this idea?

Sarah: Well, you know how T.S Eliot said that this is how cultural obsession ends, not with a bang, but with a whimper, right? It's the same for the satanic panic as it is for repressed memories, as it is for multiple personality disorder. It's not as if there's a moment when people seismically are like, oh my God, it's not a thing, we just sort of quietly stopped caring about it as Americans, you know, people can stop thinking about it.

We stopped being like, what are the Satanists up to? Everyone's like what Satanists? I don't know, you know, and they're just, I think in the nineties, we became more focused on super predators and crack babies. And we had, you know, I feel like we have these emotional poltergeists that we're constantly facing, but in different guises. One of the things that happened in the nineties also in this happened was satanic ritual abuse as well. This happened with your repressed memories, and it happened with multiple personality disorder where there were essentially, there was an aftershock to all of the legal trauma where people sued their therapists from misdiagnosing them and one settlement, good settlements sometimes in the millions.

For example, from their insurers, for allowing their therapist to be like multiple personality disorder needs lots of drugs and pajamas and is 200 people. And they were like, I don't think I was 200 people, and it was terrible to be treated for that and things where people, you know, became professional patients and really maybe could have been an outpatient. And then also that the presumed only cure for multiple personality disorder as you access or fabricated as the case may be these memories of childhood trauma and then you add react to them, you live through them. You sort of hypnotically undergo the experience. A lot of people were being treated this way and being told over and over again, that the only way out is through.

And they would keep coming up with memories of childhood trauma. And when they still didn't integrate, they had to keep going, keep telling more stories. Often would tell more intense stories because of whatever story you just told, say that your family made a human meatloaf. Isn't intense enough to explain why you're traumatized because you have an integrated yet, then you have to dig deeper and push farther and maybe come up with a memory of, you know, a whole human meat smorgasbord, whatever the next most extreme thing is. So it's just almost mathematical the way that people are being guided toward these horrific memories at this time. 

People are exonerated, Eileen Franklin's father is exonerated in the mid-nineties after spending several years in prison, but again, people don't pay attention to the correction. And another thing that we now know, and the information I have on this comes from Sybil Exposed by Debbie Nathan, which is a really fabulous book about the way that Sybil, the Sybil myth was actually created. 

And what Debbie Nathan goes in and uncovers is that Sybil after doing the multiple personality thing with Dr. Wilbur for a while, her real name was Shirley Mason. She came in and gave a letter to her doctor and said, I don't have multiple personality disorder, I didn't want to disappoint you. I displayed multiple personality disorder for you, but I just, I have to tell you this and her doctor said, one of your alternate personalities wrote this, you didn't write this. This is your psyche shielding itself from this condition being too real. 

Mike: Awesome, fabulous. That's like the conspiracy theory thing that the lack of evidence is evidence that the coverup goes deeper. This is great. 

Sarah: The lack of that evidence is evidence is such a great way to aid and abet the spread of an iffy idea. You know, it's really, yes, and so they continued therapy. 

Mike: They continued therapy after this.

Sarah: Oh yes. And Shirley, you know, really quickly ran out of ways to pay and her therapist, Dr. Wilbur said, oh, don't worry, you know, we will sell the rights to your story because your such an interesting and amazing case. Your back-pay can come from the book. And so they have to write a book because how else will she pay for the therapy? And she starts traveling around with Dr. Wilbur, staying at her house, sleeping on her couch in her pajamas and they eventually Dr. Wilbur, after deciding that the multiple personality disorder has to have come from some form of trauma, Shirley can't really remember anything. She grew up, you know, kind of nervous and depressed and not really having friends and living in a very strict seventh day Adventist household. When she was a little kid and just had a cold and radically behaving mother and also pernicious anemia, but she can't remember being horribly abused or sexually abused or physically abused. And so, Dr. Wilbur puts her into essentially these trances by giving her barbiturates or by giving her sodium Pentothal, which is truth serum, which contrary to its name is known for making people just sort of come up with ranting fabrications.

Mike: Right. Truth serum sounds super legit, super legit. 

Sarah: Well, this is proof that if you name something, something, then people really believe it is the thing that it is called as opposed to the thing that it is like no child left behind. Shirley starts producing these memories of being abused because she's being guided and suggested. And when she says something ambiguous, Dr. Wilbur is like, oh, like this kind of specific thing and Shirley's like, yes, that kind of specific thing. And the two women seem to have this very emotionally codependent relationship on each other. 

And so, this goes on for years, this goes on for years and years, Shirley is given huge doses of drugs by Dr. Wilbur. She can't really work. She's spending all her time being therapized or sort of emotionally recovering from therapy. She's a professional patient and eventually Dr. Wilbur meets this magazine author, Flora Schreiber, who decides to write a book based on Sybil’s case.

But the problem is that it's kind of boring. It's like she has these alter egos, but they don't have any adventures. And she sort of vaguely remembered, you know, going to Philadelphia in a trans state. It's not that she didn't remember going to Philadelphia and she's just, you know, kind of disassociated and kind of wonky, but you know, there is no meat on the bone.

And so Flora Schreiber invents a lot of stuff, including stories where one of Shirley's alters goes on a date. And where she doesn't remember how she got to Philadelphia. And basically, the high drama of the book is invention. And the way that Shirley integrated was that Flora was getting ready to write the book and was going to need to finish it. And Dr. Wilbur had a new job and wasn't going to be able to treat her anymore and was like, all right, Shirley, it's time to integrate now. And Shirley integrated and remained mentally ill and extremely emotionally dependent on Dr. Wilbert for the rest of her life, and lived near or with her, for the rest of her life. 

Mike: So it is like a story of indentured servitude and journalistic malpractice. It's really not about multiple personality disorders at all. It's like compounding exaggeration that the doctor is exaggerating and then the journalist is exaggerating even more. So there's this tiny little nugget of a story that sort of tidying in the end and then the doctor amplifies it and journalists amplifies what's there even more.

Sarah: The patient is amplifying for the doctor. So, there's three, there's this little grain in the middle, you know, there's a woman's pain, there's feelings of disassociation. There is the fact that her mother seems to have been emotionally abusive and then it just grew the spectacular shell. You know, so that it could be about something extreme enough for people to feel that kind of empathy for, I guess, that could allow themselves empathy. I mean, it feels like people really needed it. And the problem as with so many stories, people need to be true, is that it was not true. 

Mike: Do you know the story of Clever Hans, the horse that does math? 

Sarah: I know that he was alleged to do math. 

Mike: Yeah. This is the thing where his name is Clever Hans, he's a horse. I think it's like in Germany, in the 1800s or something, and his trainer will be like, Hans, what's 8+6, and then he'll tap his hoof 14 times, and it's like this miraculous thing. And then of course, what it turns out to be is that the horse is taking cues from his trainer, right. 

Because the trainer knows what 8+6 is, and so he's giving these subtle cues of when the horse is supposed to stop tapping, but without really realizing that he's doing it and he's like, wow, this miracle horse. And I think that's a very powerful and useful metaphor for understanding this dynamic. That you can talk someone into saying something without realizing you're doing it. Or you can manipulate someone into doing something without realizing you're doing it. Just these subtle little cues of kind of, oh, so then what happened or, and did she sexually molest you, your mother? I mean, you can do these sorts of suggestive things or even with your face, kind of give me more, give me more, give me more and people will give it to you. And then you, you become blind to the ways that you're effecting people.

Sarah: Yeah. People don't realize how much power they have, and they don't realize how much has happening in a conversation that they are not conscious of, or their interlocutor is not conscious of. I mean, this also reminds me of, there was this fascinating phenomenon where in the early nineties, there was this mini movement called Facilitated Communication. Do you remember this? It was where people who were non-verbally autistic or who had severe palsy and, you know, basically couldn't communicate verbally and lacked the motor skills to write or sign or anything like that. People were trained to help them write on keyboards and they would punch out. 

So the helper would kind of support their elbow or hold support to their arm in some way. And, you know, we'd guide the person to punch out the letter that they wanted to punch out. And it was this miraculous thing and all of these kids who had been nonverbal and some of whom had, you know, been tested as having very low IQ or just had never communicated anything before were suddenly writing essays and poems and all these things.

And they turned out not to be writing any of it because somewhat predictably given the stories we've been talking about today, kids started making allegations that their parents were abusing them, and these were taken to the authorities. And so, in a specific case in Maine, an investigator had to come up with a test to understand what was being typed out, what the helper was seeing or what the typer was seeing. And basically, took the typer out and showed her an object and brought her back in and the helper didn't know what she had seen and so just couldn't type anything. It was a blank and then when they were shown different objects, the helper wrote the object that she had seen, and this was then replicated and across, I think, hundreds of typers and various tests overwhelmingly. It was the helper who was guiding the typers hand.

And in retrospect, people should have, I think, I don't know, you can't tell people what to notice, but it's interesting that no one was like, wow, all of our children are interesting. Like none of them are just kind of boring. None of them have learned the gift of communication and don't want to write poems and just, you want to, you know, ask for chips, like everyone's a poet, everyone's an activist, of course. You know, and that we don't notice the way that we're steering the ship.

Mike: There's also this thing of kind of wanting to be a hero or wanting to save somebody. I tutor kids in math and writing on Mondays and in the training, they're like, if your kid refers to any abuse at home or any, you know, these kinds of mandatory reporting things, and there is this little part of you, that's like, it would be kind of cool to be able to save one of these kids, right. It would be kind of awesome for me, the crusading tutor to be like, ah, there's something going on here, I have to save this kid. But the vast majority of the time, you're just helping your kids do division.

Sarah: We all want to be Michelle Pfeiffer in Dangerous Minds. 

Mike: That's the thing there's like this savior myth or this hero myth that it would be kind of exciting to do that instinct is in you. But the majority of the time that you hang out with kids, they just want to talk about soccer. 

Sarah: Yeah. Well, that's like my friend Patrick, who's a writing teacher. I think the last time I saw him, he was like, you know, I watched Dead Poets Society again recently. There's no teaching in that movie, right?

Mike: Does it feel to you like repressed memories and multiple personality disorder have sort of left the legal realm? They shouldn't, they certainly haven't left pop culture, but I mean, are they just less credible now among actual professionals. 

Sarah: You know, the kinds of evidence that can get people convicted in American trials. If you just did a survey of recent criminal trials and the kinds of evidence admitted, you would find all kinds of junk science, I'm sure you would find some repressed memories. Even if the Supreme court has been like no, no repressed memories for you. There are still prosecuted that are like, eh, let's just put in a little repressed memory in this person's being taken care of by a public defender. They won't have time to challenge that they got 96 other cases to do today.

You know, because in the Franklin case, he wasn't exonerated because of some higher court being like repressed memories are not a thing. It was because in this specific case, his daughter's testimony had suggested she didn't have any information that placed her at the scene. So, it wasn't about the idea of repressed memories or their validity, so that wouldn't necessarily have altered precedent in any way, which is interesting, right. That you can have someone convicted for a kind of memory that there's no affirmative existence. And still when that conviction is overturned, it doesn't have any effect on whether people in the future can be tried and perhaps convicted based on that evidence.  

Mike: I mean how does this make you feel about sort of the moment that we're in, where people are coming forward with old memories? He said, she said type stuff, I mean, what does it make you think as far as how we as people and just as a legal system deal with this?

Sarah: I mean, one of the things I think consistently happens when people make false allegations of abuse, like allegations that are later proven, like this specific event did not happen, couldn't have happened because there are cases like that. Is that I think they often are ways that women are able to call attention to their trauma in a way that society can understand. 

I personally am fascinated by a case that happened in the late eighties where a young, black teenager named Tawana Brawley claimed that four white men, maybe six white men, a group of white men had raped her. And smeared dog shit on her and written slurs on her and put her in a garbage bag and left her out on a cold day to like die exposure. And this became an issue because you know, Tawana Brawley is picked up as an example of, this is a black victim who no one is paying attention to. I am the Reverend Al Sharpton, and all the white people were like, “How dare you, Reverend Al Sharpton. You're politicizing the trauma that this young girl is experienced and you're terrible”. And then it turned out that the allegations were false. That objectively, what she specifically alleged to have happened did not happen. 

Mike: Fuck. 

Sarah: And then of course it became the story of, see it's just another young woman of color claiming sexual trauma when really, she wants to incite a race war. And that's what everyone does when they're a woman of color claiming sexual trauma, the end forever. Which is basically, you know, a tool that therefore white America can use to ignore that trauma summarily, but also, I think what got swallowed in the midst of that is that Tawana Brawley for whatever reason was afraid to go home. She had previous run-ins with her stepfather. She was that day, visiting her boyfriend who was in prison. She was 15 based on the possibilities that you can see in those biographical details.

She was facing a lot of traumas and a lot of fear in her life. And when she pretended to be the victim of a really clear cut and awful crime, she was able to not get in trouble for not going home to her parents' house. Because she really just feared punishment, it was a very short-term thing, partly, but also, I think she was able to attract the kind of attention that she needed, but she wasn't going to get, because she hadn't been the victim of something huge and terrible. She had only been the victim of, you know, just daily experiences. So, you know, when someone makes false allegations, whether or not they consciously believe them to be true, like they're often describing some reality that they can't get the rest of America to pay attention to, or to offer them care during.

So, I mean, at the same time that I do believe that you can question the objective reality of someone's claims without that meaning that you're suggesting they're acting in bad faith or that they're saying there's something that they don't believe happened or that they are naming a trauma that in some essential way doesn't exist. Because I think we know women and girls, they do make false claims about rape intentionally or unintentionally.

We do sincerely remember things happening to us that didn't happen and that doesn't mean that accusing people of rape or sexual misconduct is a privilege that we're going to lose because it's not a privilege. It's a right, you know, this is not something that we have access to conditionally. And if you look at an allegation and you think, you know, I don't know what I think, or I don't know if I believe that's really plausible. It's hard to talk about approaching even individualists, is kind of more critically without inadvertently allying yourself with a warring faction. Right, it's that kind of a time. 

Mike: Yeah. I mean, the ally thing is hard in that, I'm sure that in the eighties and nineties, there were a lot of really odious people being like these rape allegations are fake and multiple personality disorders are just women being crazy.

Sarah: All the opinions that I have and sincerely think about and, you know, lie with my little hands clasp pondering are the kinds of arguments that ambulance chasing lawyers of the eighties would have made in their dim lighted courtrooms at one time or another. It is my multitude in itself, really. I would actually close by asking you, I don't know, are you disappointed that multiple personality doesn't exist the way it did in Primal Fear? 

Mike: I don't know. I mean, I have such complicated thoughts on just kind of mental illness as a category, as someone who knows people with mental illness, there are real, it is real. But then there's also, it's so blurry and it's so hard to measure and it's so difficult to put a name to it and names are often times so wrong. And then there's this infinite feedback loop where if you diagnose somebody with something, they will sometimes begin to act out those behaviors, or they will take that diagnosis as an identity, which is a very human thing to do.

And so, it's this weird circular thing where it's like in some ways, multiple personality disorders are bullshit, but then in other ways, kind of every mental illness is bullshit. But then in other ways, like every mental illness is completely real too. And it has an extremely real effect. So, you don't ever want to take something away from someone and say like, no, what you're experiencing isn't real or the things that you're describing didn't really happen to you. But you can't just accept every fashionable diagnosis either.  

Sarah: I mean, I think maybe diagnosis is like memory really where you can create a diagnosis by describing it, or you can reinforce it, or you can alter it somewhat and there are people who are very suggestible to that and people who are not, and the authority figures in our lives have a lot of power. And so, it makes sense that they would shape our perceptions and our understanding of our own condition. Being shaped in terms of the way you see yourself and your identity by an authority figure who you're offering that access and that vulnerability to like that doesn't mean that like anything isn't really. You got there differently than in the story that you're being told.

Mike:  Right. I just, as a person have no idea what to do with any of this without being a total asshole. 

Sarah: Yeah. Our alternate title could be, I have no idea what to do with any of this 

Mike: Tagline idea.