Sybil

“‘Maybe it was some part of her native Wisconsin,’ she thinks, but how could she have gotten to Wisconsin in the split second between standing at the Columbia University elevator and now? But she couldn’t have gotten anywhere in that time. Maybe she hadn’t; maybe she wasn’t anywhere. Maybe this was a nightmare.” 

These lines, from the very beginning of the book, give the reader a snapshot into Sybil’s mind right after she “awakens” in a strange city, when the last thing she remembers is being in the lab at Columbia University. They show what the experience of being ill feels like from the “waking” Sybil’s perspective, as she tries, with panic, to reason through where she is and what happened. Even though Sybil knows what her “lost time” means at this point in her treatment, and has experienced such episodes for years, the blank spell still perplexes her. These lines exemplify Schreiber’s narrative style in the opening chapter, as she seeks to help the reader empathize with the “waking” Sybil and establish Sybil as the central personality.

“The excitement about seeing a psychiatrist was overshadowed, however, by the pronoun she. A woman? Had she heard correctly? All the doctors she had ever known were men[…]Sybil only half heard him because the initial terror of seeing in her mind a woman psychiatrist almost eradicated his words. But then suddenly the fear lifted. She had a warm relationship with Miss Updyke, the college nurse.” 

Sybil’s reaction to learning that her family doctor’s referral is to a female psychiatrist gives the reader indirect insight into Dr. Wilbur’s character. Sybil’s reaction exemplifies how many people in that time and place must have reacted to Dr. Wilbur: with suspicion and preparedness to underestimate her, because they only know male doctors. At the same time, Sybil’s reaction in the first moment of hearing about Dr. Wilbur sets up the complicated, loving terms of their relationship. Her acute fear of Dr. Wilbur–not just a fear that Dr. Wilbur won’t be competent, but a true terror–already suggests that Sybil is afraid because she worries Dr. Wilbur will be like her mother. But Sybil’s elation at remembering her good relationship with the nurse, her realization that Dr. Wilbur can be a nurturing figure, establishes her relationship with Dr. Wilbur from the beginning as one that she hopes will replace and erase her relationship with her mother.

“The whole situation was awful all the time. Sybil desperately wanted to get well, and the scenes at home did not help at all. Yet there was no way out. If her talking led to a scene, so too did her silence.” 

These sentences describe Sybil’s feelings about living with her parents while initially seeing Dr. Wilbur in Omaha, and they evidence from the beginning the character of the Dorsett’s abuse of their daughter. Rather than being neglectful, or simply mean, the Dorsetts are intrusive in their relationship to their daughter. It’s not only that they disapprove of most of what she does, it’s that they nevertheless want to know, and criticize it, and expect to control it. Sybil cannot avoid trouble by being silent, but she also invites trouble by telling her parents about the treatment they disapprove of: this lose-lose situation is the first description of the “capture-control-imprisonment-torture” game that characterizes Hattie’s abuse.

“And it had been her mother, nursing her bizarre secret, who, by preventing the continuation of treatment, had deliberately shaped her daughter’s destiny. The horror, the pain, the sadness of it! Yet there were no recriminations. Nobody ever criticized Hattie Dorsett. There was no flare-up of anger against her. Anger was evil.” 

When Sybil drops out of college because Hattie Dorsett insists Sybil is the only person who can nurse her through her pancreatic cancer, Hattie casually tells her that she faked the phone call to Dr. Wilbur years earlier, when Sybil had asked her to call and tell the doctor that she couldn’t make her appointment because she was sick. By the time Sybil was well, Dr. Wilbur, who thought she had decided to give up treatment, had moved to Chicago. Sybil had given up the treatment that had made her so hopeful, and had been nursing feelings of deep betrayal and abandonment for years. All of this pain is given release in the fragmentary sentence, “the horror, the pain the sadness of it!” Yet the pain is quickly tamped down, not even allowed to develop into the fullness of an actual accusation of Hattie. Instead, Sybil displays for the first time the repression of her hatred against her mother: she does not even allow herself to be angry at this monumental betrayal. Instead, the flash of anger turns back on herself, a habit of self-blame we will later learn is cultivated by Hattie’s abuse. This quote is also an example of Schreiber’s use of free-indirect discourse: the sentence “there were no recriminations” is clearly in the voice of the narrator, describing what is absent from Sybil’s thoughts. With the sentence “Anger was evil,” we can see the narration shift into the voice of Sybil’s mind, speaking not the opinions of the narrator but rather the words Sybil says to herself.

“Each time one of these incidents occurred, and they had been occurring since she was three and a half, it was as if it were happening for the first time. Ever since she had, at fourteen, become aware of her situation, she had told herself each time that she would begin all over again and that it couldn’t happen again. In Detroit the episodes had been overwhelmingly numerous, and yet, even then, she had braced herself to dismiss each one as the last. This time, however, the illusion of the first time assumed even greater terror than it usually did because of the deep disappointment she felt this January, 1958–three and a half years since her analysis had begun–that an episode like that in Philadelphia should occur.” 

Here, Schreiber describes the state of mind she shows in Chapter 1. This description explores how Sybil’s self-blame works as a defense mechanism: her belief that she can prevent another episode of blankness from happening creates an illusion of control, a sense that she is able to “start again.” The belief that she is “beginning again” implicitly erases the past events, so that she can pretend they never happened, and that all is well. On the other hand, such an attitude renders each event more traumatic, as if it is the first time; and the task of starting over again and again, rather than sustaining the illusion of wellness, begins to seem daunting once she has been working so hard in analysis. 

“My forte is people. I’m not afraid of them because my mother and father were always very good to me. I like to talk to people and to listen to them. I especially enjoy people who talk music, art, and books.” 

When Vicky introduces herself to Dr. Wilbur with these words, she makes it clear that she is everything Sybil is not. While Sybil fears letting anyone in, Vicky’s forte is people. While Sybil is afraid of sophisticates, having always been socially isolated by the intensity of religion and her illness, Vicky revels in talking to people with patrician interests, and sees herself as one of them. While Sybil’s parents abused her, Vicky’s were good to her. In addition to underlining the way Sybil has repressed her own understanding that her parents were not good to her, and that their abuse is the source of her illness, Vicky’s illusion that her parents are not Sybil’s parents exemplifies the way Sybil’s personalities have constructed elaborate rationalizations to support their status as independent people.  

“‘I think it will reassure Sybil to know that she is functioning even though she doesn’t know it.’

‘She, Doctor?’ Vicky asked quizzically. ‘Isn’t the pronoun we?’

The doctor paused and made no direct answer. It was a thoughtful Vicky who broke the silence, saying, ‘I suppose you can tell Sybil. But I repeat: is it she who is functioning?’ Without waiting for the doctor to reply, Vicky asserted, ‘We’re people, you know. People in our own right.’” 

This exchange between Vicky and Dr. Wilbur occurs when Dr. Wilbur seeks Vicky’s advice about how to best deliver a diagnosis to Sybil. Vicky’s insistence that the personalities are independent people is one of the first challenges to the idea of a self in the book. If the other personalities are not, as Vicky says, independent people, on what basis do they fail to be individual and independent selves? Vicky’s demand to be recognized also thematically introduces the ultimate course of analysis: rather than eliminating the selves and seeing them as threatening reminders of the past, the personalities represent necessary but harshly restricted and repressed parts of Sybil’s personality, parts that demand to be recognized as important in order for healing to take place.

“What was most disturbing to Sybil was her feeling that she had no reason to be unhappy and that, by being so, she was somehow betraying her parents. To assuage her feelings of guilt she prayed for forgiveness on three counts: for not being more grateful for all she had; for not being happy, as her mother thought she should be; and for what her mother termed ‘not being like other youngsters.’”

As a child, Sybil struggles to understand the feeling of lack she has, and what causes it. Here, Schreiber displays how the circumstances of Sybil’s childhood work together to produce the self-blame that enables the adult Sybil’s resistance. Sybil’s religion, her society’s conservative values of obedience, and her parents’ own personal strictness and constant criticism all work together to make Sybil ashamed of the feelings she can’t even name, so that before she is even able to name this unhappiness, she feels even more freakish and abnormal. The natural reaction to the circumstances of her childhood is repressed when it is turned back on herself in the form of guilt.  

“Sybil saw not the metal casket, the flowers, or the people; what she saw was Mary, her Canadian grandmother married to a native of Willow Corners, living in his town. An outsider to the people in his church, Mary had been forced to do his bidding. She loved to read, but he had stopped her with the injunction: ‘Anything but truth is false.’ Religious writings alone were true, he thought.”

Sybil recalls these thoughts about Grandmother Dorsett—her status as outsider, the ways she suffered her husband’s arbitrary and all-powerful domination—during the climactic moment of burial. Moments later she will dissociate and become Peggy Lou for two years. These thoughts create a thematic link between Grandma Dorsett, Hattie, and Sybil, three women who all suffer trauma and the domination of an authority figure in their lives. They are three figures who long for freedom. These words deepen our understanding of why Grandma Dorsett’s death is traumatic for Sybil: not only is Grandma Dorsett Sybil’s only reprieve from Hattie, and her only experience of love, Sybil, who is also kept from writing the poetry and stories she loves to write, sees herself in Grandma Dorsett.

“Who is the circumference, the center? the doctor wondered. Is Sybil the center or is one of these others?” 

Dr. Wilbur asks herself this question when personalities beyond Vicky and Peggy Lou begin to emerge. The question is transformative for Sybil’s analysis: it is the first time that Dr. Wilbur truly questions what wellness will look like, and whether Sybil is the true self, simply because she is the personality who bears the legal name Sybil Dorsett and who first walked into Dr. Wilbur’s office. The question is also thematically central: it opens up the question of what it really means to be a “true” or central self. It challenges for the first time the reader’s sense that a self is a natural, self-evident thing, and opens up the possibility that a self is not one, dominant, unified identity, as we are used to thinking of it, but a cluster of identities, swirling around each other or organized hierarchically.

“Sybil loved her grandmother, but she hadn’t intervened when her mother said, ‘Now, Grandma, don’t go near Sybil. She’s being punished.’ Her grandmother hadn’t intervened when her mother tripped Sybil as she was going down the stairs. Her grandmother had asked what had happened, and her mother had replied, ‘You know how clumsy children are. She fell downstairs.’ The rage Sybil felt at her grandmother was repressed.” 

Even though Sybil loves her grandmother, and her grandmother provides her the one reprieve she has from Hattie’s abuse, Schreiber editorializes that Sybil suffers repressed rage for Grandma Dorsett. That Schreiber, and, subconsciously, Sybil, blame Grandma Dorsett for Sybil’s abuse emphasizes the communal nature of trauma: to ignore the abuse of a child requires the culpable inaction of the whole town, and beyond. It also provides insight into the depth of Sybil’s loneliness. The abuse she suffers pollutes even her most treasured relationships, because no one understands or is willing to pull her out of what she suffers. The isolation she experiences while holding in and suffering under the secret of abuse is doubled in adult life when she holds in and suffers under the secret of her illness. 

“Distressed by those who didn’t come to her rescue, Sybil nevertheless invested the perpetrator of the tortures with immunity from blame. The buttonhook was at fault, or the enema tip, or the other instruments of torture. The perpetrator, however, by virtue of being her mother, whom one had not only to obey but also to love and honor, was not to blame. Almost two decades later, when Hattie, then on her deathbed in Kansas City, remarked, ‘I really shouldn’t have been so cross with you when you were a child,’ it seemed sinful to Sybil to even recollect that euphemistic crossness.” 

This quotation illustrates how the mechanism of Sybil’s resistance works: just as her parents restrict her actions and movements with their commands, their values and their religion restrict Sybil’s thoughts, making any other feelings about her mother besides obedience and honor literally unthinkable. Instead, Sybil displaces the blame which should find its object in her mother onto the inanimate objects her mother uses in her abuse, and ultimately onto herself, for having even glimmers of resentment at her mother.

“Hattie, a tall, slender girl with wavy, auburn hair and blue-gray eyes, whose elementary school report cards revealed a solid phalanx of As, who wrote poetry and whose music teachers had such high regard for her ability that they supported her dream of going to a music conservatory and of becoming a concert pianist, saw the collapse of her ambitions when she was twelve years old. At that time her father yanked her out of the seventh grade to work in his music store[…]There was no economic justification for making Hattie give up her studies, no plausible argument for requiring her to renounce her dreams.” 

This quote describes the moment in Hattie’s life that Dr. Wilbur believes activated her schizophrenia, and it fleshes out the reader’s understanding of her abuse of Sybil. Schreiber emphasizes the arbitrary nature of Hattie’s father’s power, thematically linking the suffering of Hattie’s childhood both to Willard’s later arbitrary dictates and the sufferings of Grandma Dorsett at the hands of her husband, who demanded complete obedience to all his own irrational beliefs.

Hattie’s deepest desires are arbitrarily quashed by an all-powerful parental authority; in her abuse of Sybil, she becomes the all-powerful parental authority, issuing arbitrary dictates about when Sybil can or can’t go to the bathroom, whether she can or can’t make her own Christmas ornaments. Because Hattie’s suffering at the hands of her father recalls the power exerted by other husbands and fathers–Aubrey and Willard Dorsett–this crucial moment also makes clear why Hattie’s hatred of men, which Peggy Lou inherits, is at the center of her abuse, and why her abuse is sexual in nature, preparing Sybil, she says, for the pain men will inflict on her.

“Occasionally slipping through the protective armor of the overcompensating memory, however, was the fact that Hattie sometimes blamed her ‘trouble’ on her father. Even though she never defined what that trouble was, everybody who knew her knew also that she had a problem. The trouble was epitomized by a McCall’s magazine photograph Hattie clipped and saved with the other mementos in her overstocked array of keepsakes. The photograph was of an attractive woman standing at a fence. The caption read: No, she was not particularly loved. She sensed it. Unloved, Hattie Anderson Dorsett was incapable of loving.” 

Schreiber’s explanation of Hattie’s “trouble” further links the mother’s experience with the daughter’s. This quote emphasizes the way trauma is heritable and self-reproducing: being unloved produces the inability to love, which in turn produces Sybil’s struggle to let anyone else in. Just as Sybil cannot admit that she hates her mother, and protectively tells herself she loves her mother, so Hattie also cannot admit her own hatred of her father, and disguises and overcompensates for this “improper” feeling with an almost obsessive and showy love of him.

“Indisputable now was the fact that the violent tyrannies of this non-neurotic father (the doctor was convinced that he was free of neurosis), consisting of bland evasions, the shrug that withheld concern, the lifelong retreat into his shell, had augmented the mother’s violent tyrannies into driving Sybil to search for a psychoneurotic solution to the intolerable reality of her childhood. The mother was the taproot of Sybil’s having become a multiple personality, but the father, Dr. Wilbur was now sure, through the guilt not of commission but of omission, was an important associated root. The mother had trapped Sybil, but the father, even though Sybil herself had never quite admitted it, had made her feel that from that trap there was no exit.” 

Dr. Wilbur is convinced that it isn’t just Hattie who is responsible for Sybil’s condition, but that Willard plays a role almost as important. Highlighting Willard’s responsibility, and the responsibility of passivity, thematically stresses the communal nature of trauma. It throws the culpability for Sybil’s abuse onto all of the people in Willow Corners and beyond who looked the other way and enabled the abuse. By extension, it also challenges the Freudian framework Schreiber says Dr. Wilbur is aware of not falling into, of casting blame on the mother as the root of all evils. 

“‘She keeps reliving the past,’ Clara reported. ‘She keeps thinking her mother is going to hurt her.’ Clara paused. Then she added, ‘I’m glad I never had a mother.’” 

Clara voices one of the key characteristics of trauma, which Sybil’s case vividly exemplifies: its quality of being ever-present, always recurring, timeless. Her insistence that she doesn’t have a mother also illustrates one of the ways that the selves are practically able to live in Sybil’s body and yet believe themselves to be separate beings: they construct elaborate rationalizations, and separate personal histories, for how they’ve come to be and how they are different. This rationalization also serves as a form of resistance to acknowledging trauma: either the personalities deny their hatred of Hattie, or they deny that she is their mother at all. 

“The selves, the doctor was now convinced, were not conflicting parts of the total self, struggling for identity, but rather defenses against the intolerable environment that had produced the childhood traumas. Sybil’s mind and body were possessed by these others–not invading spirits, not dybbuks from without, but proliferating parts of the original child. Each self was younger than Sybil, with their ages shifting according to the time of the particular trauma that each had emerged to battle.” 

Dr. Wilbur’s realization that the selves are not in conflict with one another, are not struggling for dominance, but are rather each lost and integral parts of the “original” child, is an important turn in the course of the analysis, one that Vicky originally suggested (see Quotation #7) when she insisted to Dr. Wilbur that the personalities should also be credited with Sybil’s functioning.

Realizing that while her disorder is harmful, the multiple personalities actually undertake functions of self-care that Sybil refuses to take on behalf of herself ultimately paves the path to wellness: when she can listen to the demands of the other selves and recognize them as her own, Sybil finally integrates them. This vision of a fractured identity not in conflict with itself but constructively working together to form a whole thematically challenges the idea of the self as singular, unified, and defined against what it excludes.

“What continued to be real to Sybil, as it had been before the label multiple personality had been attached to her condition, was the fact that she lost time. In late 1957 and early 1958 Sybil was still promising herself that she would not lose time, and the promise in adulthood as in childhood still carried the overtone of ‘I will be good, not evil.’” 

Here, Schreiber describes the attitude under which Sybil operates until the traumatic and transformative episode in which Peggy Lou takes her to Philadelphia. Though Dr. Wilbur has told Sybil about her multiple personalities, she continues to think of the phenomenon as “losing time.” Believing that she can just resolve to herself not to lose time goes hand in hand with her inability to acknowledge the other selves. So long as she is in control of “losing time,” she has only herself to blame for her condition if it persists, which means she does not have to blame Hattie or admit that she hates her. Until Philadelphia, the analysis has been unable to break the habit of guilt and self-blame that Hattie’s abuse, as well as their strict religion, instilled in Sybil.

“‘I’m not just a patient. I’m patients.’ The stress on the ‘s’ carried a terrifying overtone. ‘At least that’s what you tell me. And I’m supposed to listen and face the fact that I’m a freak.’

‘Sybil, Sybil,’ the doctor urged. ‘you’re distorting the truth. The others are part of you. We all have different parts of our personalities. The abnormality lies not in the division, but in the dissociation, the amnesia, and the terrible traumas that gave rise to the others.’” 

Sybil’s declaration to Dr. Wilbur that she is a freak underlines the ways in which her illness isolates her and perpetuates her loneliness. Her suffering is so unique that it would be difficult for most people to understand, exacerbating the difficulty with intimacy and love that a lifetime of abuse already created. The declaration also illustrates the shame that Hattie made her feel the few times Sybil did, as a child, bring up her blank spells, as well as when Hattie asked her why she couldn’t be like other youngsters. Dr. Wilbur’s response to Sybil attempts to make her feel connected to the rest of society. It also suggests the ways Dr. Wilbur and Schreiber see Sybil’s case as illuminating for all of us: Sybil’s case highlights the way all selves really are: fractured, layered, constructed by those around us.

“Once the alternating self has acted out the emotions that at any given time have triggered her, there is no longer any reason for her to function. Philadelphia was Peggy Lou’s way of acting out in the present what you and she had repressed in the past. By doing exactly as she pleased for five days, she exhausted the angry, hostile feelings that had been awakened in the chemistry lab. When you are unable to handle such feelings, Peggy Lou does it for you.” 

Dr. Wilbur elaborates on her insight that the personalities are not simply harmful relics of the past, but necessary parts of Sybil’s self. Reflecting on why Peggy Lou took Sybil to Philadelphia, and then why she was able to relinquish control of the body and give it back to Sybil, Dr. Wilbur lays out how that insight will lead to healing and treatment: rather than “eliminating” the other personalities, Sybil will need to acknowledge them, accept them as her own, and give them the outlets they need.

“Our arms went around his neck. We looked into his face and asked, ‘Would you like to have a little girl?’

He had liked the way we fixed his cufflink. We were sure he would like to have us do it all the time. We waited for him to say, ‘Yes, I want a little girl.’

He didn’t say that. He didn’t say anything. He just turned away from us, and we saw that white coat moving toward the door. The white coat faded into nothingness. Again rescue was gone.” 

Vicky recounts the early trauma, when Sybil was 3 years old, that brought Vicky into being: when Sybil is taken to a hospital in Minnesota, her kind doctor notices that she is malnourished, and scolds Hattie for it. Sybil hopes to be rescued by him. That one of the foundational traumas of her illness was perpetrated not by her father, or her mother, but by a stranger who turned the other way emphasizes once again the way that trauma is created and sustained by community. It also highlights that Sybil’s personalities were a measure of the last resort: only when she realizes that rescue cannot be found anywhere, not even in another state, so far away from the traumas of home, Vicky emerges from within to take Sybil away psychically.

“When Sybil blacked out in the apartment or returned to it as one of the other personalities, almost inevitably Teddy was a witness. It was even more disturbing to face the fact that Teddy had built quite separate relationships with Vicky, the Peggy’s, Mike and Sid, Marcia and Vanessa, Mary, Sybil Ann, and the other personalities. This knowledge deepened Sybil’s uneasiness and gave loneliness a terrifying new dimension. What did these others tell Teddy? Privacy was impossible as long as unknown voices proclaimed secrets in the apartment.” 

Once Sybil reaches the point in her treatment when she is able to acknowledge her other personalities’ existence, her relationship with them intensifies and complicates, sometimes in ways that prevent her from accepting those other personalities as her own. One of those complex feelings is jealousy: Sybil is jealous that her personalities have relationships with the few people (namely Teddy and Dr. Wilbur) whom she is really intimate with. The idea that she is not the complete and sole owner of those relationships makes her feel even more lonely: how can she truly connect with anyone when they carry on a whole relationship with “her” that she doesn’t have access to? The intensification of this loneliness is what leads Sybil to attempt suicide at the end of the chapter from which this quote comes.

“Was this memory? She did not know. If it was, it was memory of a different kind; for she was remembering not what she had done as Sybil but what–and this was the bewildering part of the recollection–she had done as Mary and Sybil Ann. Sybil was distinctly aware of two persons, each of whom knew what the other was doing and saying[…]Sybil remembered that at one moment she had been Mary, at the next Sybil Ann, and that when she was the one, the other was a person beside her, to whom she could talk and express opinions and from whom she could seek advice.” 

Schreiber recounts one of the first times Sybil is consciously able to make herself remember something that happened in what she still mostly experiences as a fugue state. Sybil’s experience of remembering herself as two others challenges our ability to understand what “self” is, and shows how her case has implications for the way we think about that category, psychologically and philosophically.

“You’re getting Sybil ready to go into the world on her own. You’ve encouraged her in her dream of being an independent woman and making a place for herself. A teacher? Maybe. But the big jobs in education are held by men[…]Medical schools are very selective about the women they take, and they’re not going to settle for her. This is still a man’s world, and women don’t really have a chance. Doctor, it’s time to wake up to the truth about Sybil Dorsett. She’s a woman, and a woman can’t wow the world.” 

Mike and Sid are two of the final personalities who linger as separate beings. The fact that they are reluctant to integrate with Sybil because “she’s a woman” speaks to the role gender plays in Sybil’s trauma, as well as in her dynamic with Dr. Wilbur, a doctor whose engagement with her is partly motivated by her ambition to “wow the world” against the odds. Their reluctance points to the challenge Schreiber faces in resolving Sybil’s story. Sybil’s illness has prevented her from leading what most considered in 1973 a “normal” life for a woman, as a wife and mother; if she still can’t attain these things, what would constitute wellness?