Doug Mesner reviews Twenty-Two-Faces at Dysgenics

At Dysgenics, Doug Mesner pens the most thorough review, to-date, of Judy Byington's Twenty-Two Faces, noting the book "offers insight into psychological disorder, just not in the way the author intended." [1]

Instead, writes Mesner, Twenty-Two Faces

falls within an outdated genre of prurient Satanic Panic supernatural-erotica-sold-as-a-true-story pulp novels which enjoyed a certain popularity throughout the 80s and 90s ... even placing the book Satan's Underground by Lauren Stratford in the bibliography, despite the fact that this book was so thoroughly discredited as to be withdrawn from publication, with the author changing her name and running off, abandoning her claim to Satanic cult abuse to instead pose as a childhood victim of the Holocaust.

Of course, even the old MPD/DID narrative is dubious enough, to put it nicely. The most recent research from out of Harvard finds that, despite claims to otherwise, those diagnosed and demonstrating MPD/DID do not actually suffer amnesia between one personality state to the next. Nor has the notion of traumatic repression -- the likes of which is described in “case studies” like the Jenny Hill story -- stood up to scientific scrutiny in the course of the past 20+ years since MPD/DID enjoyed its Sybil-fueled faddish rise.

But, to argue against the credibility of Twenty-Two Faces by invoking current progress in brain research, or even arguing against the existence of wide-scale secretive Satanic cult mind-control plots, is to give the book far too much credit. Twenty-Two Faces doesn’t merely beggar the imagination in its over-the-top conspiracist description of MPD/DID.... [it also] defies scientific credibility altogether by being a supernatural tale.
To wit, the book includes:

    • Prophecy: The protagonist’s birth is foretold by her uncle in exacting detail.
    • Extra Sensory Perception (ESP): apparently believing that child abuse can prove beneficial to the victim, author Judy Byington describes that the protagonist, Jenny Hill, was able to break through certain subliminal barriers, not in spite of, but because of, early humiliations
    • Divine guidance: desperate and in prayer, Jenny Hill hears “a soft, yet thundering voice”, which urges her to “continue to write down your life experiences, for one day a book will be written.”
    • Divine intervention: In the midst of a Satanic ceremony in which she is bound to an altar, Jenny Hill is spared from sacrifice by a bare-footed “white-robed male personage, surrounded in a glorious White Light”. (Had this “personage” taken a little effort to arrive just a moment earlier, he could have spared the unlucky girl next to Hill, who is said to have been decapitated... but I’m sure His schedule is as busy as His Ways mysterious.)
    • Spirit Possession: Making clear that possession isn’t merely a more primitive cultural interpretation of DID, Byington describes that Hill suffered both DID and spirit possession, the latter being cured by the prayers of LDS church officials

"The antagonist of Twenty-Two Faces," writes Mesner, "is the quintessential villain of conspiracy folklore, managing membership in several scheming cabals which may appear paradoxical or mutually exclusive to the untrained paranoid."

Not only is he a God-less Jew, but 'turncoat' Nazi Jew who worships Satan. His name is Dr. Greenbaum, and his legend precedes this rambling and dissonant tome within the fringes of hysterical recovered memory-derived folklores, best explicated by a Dr. Corydon Hammond in a speech he gave in 1992 titled Hypnosis in Multiple Personality Disorder: Ritual Abuse.

Mesner also notes that Twenty-Two Faces sports a forward written by Dr. Colin Ross and an endorsement from Joyanna Silberg, Ph.D., Past President of the International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation (ISSTD), which, "if anything," writes Mesner, "says something negative about the ISSTD more than it tells us anything substantive about Byington’s book...."

In sum, Mesner calls the book

truly offensive, as it hijacks children’s rights and attempts to create human shields of real victims as protection against criticisms directed at patently absurd claims. In the proper context, Twenty-Two Faces is a helpful book, as it illustrates this problem clearly for those who may doubt the magnitude to which conspiracists have over-run the study of Dissociative Disorders. Byington does not simply misappropriate the condition of multiple personalities as a plot device for her ridiculous book, she shows the condition for what it largely (if not entirely) is: a collaborative therapeutically-created delusion. In trying to expose a Satanic conspiracy, Byington unwittingly exposes a foul movement that exploits vulnerable mental health consumers. Let’s hope the licensing boards and professional associations eventually move to erase such embarrassments from practice.

Read Mesner's full review.

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[1] Douglas Mesner, "When Therapists are Lunatics: A Review of 22 Faces by Judy Byington." Dysgenics. September 27, 2012 http://www.dysgenics.com/2012/09/27/when-therapists-are-lunatics-a-review-of-22-faces-by-judy-byington/

Article at The American Chronicle

At the American Chronicle, which touts "5,000 contributors, over 100,000 articles, and over 11 million visitors annually" as of 21 July 2012, Tracee Gleichner secures Judy Byington a "guest" article, wherein Byington continues to claim that she has acted since 2006 "as a consultant on satanic crime for the Utah Attorney General's Office of Special Investigations"--a claim that the Utah AG's Office has denied.

Readers also learn that the licensed counseling social worker has touched the lives of "hundreds" of women whom Byington has labeled survivors of "ritual abuse."

According to Byington, the subject of her book Twenty-Two Faces, Jenny Hill, suffered as a child "months of abuse by a group of black hooded-robed men in painted white faces directed by a Nazi master mind-control programmer known as Dr. Greenbaum."

According to Colin A. Ross, M.D., founder of the Dallas-based Colin Ross Institute for Psychological Trauma, who provided a glowing foreword to Byington's book

clients from different areas of the country have purported this "Dr. Green" was a Jewish turncoat who worked under tutelage of Nazi doctors experimenting on children in concentration camps. Greenbaum was believed brought into the U.S. after World War II by the CIA for their Project Paperclip mind-control program.

Buyington also mentions the work of Corydon Hammond, Ph.D., of the University of Utah Medical Center Family Practice Clinic, who joined 18 other therapists to conduct an eight-year probe on their ritually-abused clients' backgrounds, concluding that "75% claimed torture under direction of a Dr. Greenbaum." Interestingly, Hammond was also one of the self-proclaimed experts on satanism who consulted for Dr. Allan Tesson, who was sued for $650,000, in 1996, for implanting false memories of satanic ritual abuse and child pornography in one of his adult patients.

Also notable is the mention of Weston Whatcott, Ph.D., M.S.W., L.C.S.W., who treated Jenny Hill at the Utah State Psychiatric Hospital 1984-1985, and who states

Jenny's multiplicity was a result of childhood trauma: repeated sexual assaults coupled with ritual abuse. Her background as so eloquently portrayed in Twenty-Two Faces is congruent with what I observed at the hospital including narrative of her alters [sic] personalities.

In addition to being an expert of covert organized child sexual abuse, Whatcott also founded West-Sands Adoptions in Provo, which for decades has flown-in to Utah children from Asia to Africa, for placement in private homes and various orphanages.

Lastly, Byington claims that Jenny Hill knows the fate of Kathleen Shea, who disappeared in Pennsylvania in 1965 at the age of six, and for whom relatives still grieve, in a case that remains officially unsolved. Although neither law enforcement nor Shea's family have commented on Byington's claims, she maintains that on June 21, 1965, Jenny Hill "was taken to a 'Black Temple' rite in Garden Grove, California where [Jenny] was strapped to an alter [sic], tortured and forced to watch the murder" of  Shea, which Byington describes in graphic detail in her book.