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falls within an outdated genre of prurient Satanic Panic supernatural-erotica-sold-as-a-true-story pulp novels which enjoyed a certain popularity throughout the 80s and 90s ...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by Lauren Stratford in the bibliography, despite the fact that this book was so thoroughly discredited as to be withdrawn from publication, with the author changing her name and running off, abandoning her claim to Satanic cult abuse to instead pose as a childhood victim of the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

Review at Backward Messages

At Backward Messages, Beth Winegarner (author of The Columbine Effect) reviews Twenty-Two Faces, cautioning readers: "Just when you thought we were safe from the 'Satanic ritual abuse' moral panic," Judy Byington "resurrects the disproven ideas of multiple personality disorder and Satanic ritual abuse ... a syndrome many believe is actually the result of brainwashing by therapists."

According to Byington, “Satanic mind control programming" created 22 personalities in Jenny Hill. "Well," sighs Messages, "at least [Byington]’s right about the 'mind control' part." [1]

Many believe that these false memories are ... exploited by therapists, who claim it will take many years of treatment for people to heal — thus ensuring a steady, paying client base for the therapist.

Messages also notes that Byington is the founder of the "Trauma Research Center" (which appears to exist as a website only).

There, she sells copies of her books and offers for-pay “webinars” on dissociative identity disorder/multiple personality disorder and other topics..... According to a guest post over on She Writes, she has another book on the way, Saints, Sinners and Satan, “a first person account of her own experiences with multiple personality survivors and Occult crime.”

Messages is careful to point out the offense Byington gives actual sexual assault victims and the mentally ill. "We do need outlets for legitimate sufferers of trauma," writes Messages. Byington instead offers up a mix of the exploitative, the prurient, and the ridiculous.

But does Byington think she can really sell this idea in 2012, when most people are pretty skeptical of Satanic-abuse claims — and with good reason? Is society tipping back to a place of superstition and fear?

Read the rest at Backward Messages: "Retired therapist invents 22 ways to make money, and all of them involve 'Satanic ritual abuse"

[1] "Retired therapist invents 22 ways to make money, and all of them involve 'Satanic ritual abuse.'" Backward Messages. 30 July 2012. http://backwardmessages.wordpress.com/2012/07/30/retired-therapist-invents-22-ways-to-make-money-and-all-of-them-involve-satanic-ritual-abuse/

Blogcritics Review

In a BlogCritics "review" penned by Tracee Gleichner, PR Specialist at Pump Up Your Book Promotion (whose services Byington has contracted), readers learn that "even at age five Jenny Hill had learned how turning to prayer subconsciously" helped her to utilize "alter personalities" to "compartmentalize abuse at the hands of a master mind-control expert from Nazi Germany." But even with the help of prayer and twenty-two separate personalities,

blank periods resulting from the competing alters taking over her mind and body caused the confused child to lose minutes, hours, days even months of time while they experienced for her, the pain and memory of rapes, tortures and extreme stress of being forced to view a human sacrifice ceremony.

"After Heavenly intervention saved the child from certain death," readers learn, "men in hooded robes no longer contacted Jenny, but were ever-present in her nightmares."

Nor were Satanists the last of her problems: Jenny's father "continued to pursue his salacious bedroom activities"; one of Jenny's personalities suggested she take a different route on her way home, into "an alley where she was gang-raped by a dozen older boys"; after which Jenny fell into prostitution, drugs, and smoking cigarettes.

"Meanwhile," the review continues, the "core personality" of Jenny Hill--that is, the person whom the rest of the world new as Jenny Hill--

completed army medic training, was crowned a beauty queen, graduated from college, prepared for a church mission, worked as a nurse and gave birth to sons, all while Jenny was unaware of her multiple personalities and their takeovers.

With some grammatical confusion, but also free of actual psychological jargon, the review concludes that "Twenty-Two Faces is a journey into the ever-evolving human psyche from which can uncover not only long-term affects of child abuse so severe it results in multiplicity, but new insights into the mind's thinking patterns."