SYBIL
By
Flora Rheta Schreiber
Published by: Warner Books, Inc., a Time Warner Company, New York, NY.
Copyright 1973 by Flora Rheta Schreiber BOOK JACKET INFORMATION "Spellbinding!"
--Time More amazing than any work of fiction, yet true in every word, it swept to the top of the bestseller lists and riveted the consciousness of the world. As an Emmy Award-winning film starring Sally Field, it captured the home screens of an entire nation and has endured as the most electrifying TV movie ever made. It's the story of a survivor of terrifying childhood abuse, victim of sudden and mystifying blackouts, and the first case of multiple personality ever to be psychoanalyzed. You're about to meet Sybil--and the sixteen selves to whom she played host, both women and men, each with a different personality, speech pattern, and even personal appearance. You'll experience the strangeness and fascination of one woman's rare affliction--and travel with her on her long, ultimately triumphant journey back to wholeness.
"A moving human narrative."
--New York Review of Books "Astonishing ... It forces you to look at yourself and the people around you in a new way."
--Doris Lessing SYBIL SWEEPS THE CRITICS!
"Fascinating ... highly readable and illuminating. ... High marks all around and most especially to Sybil herself for her endurance and courage and insistence on survival in the face of what must have seemed like overwhelming odds."
--Chicago Tribune "The best of this genre since The Three Faces of Eve."--Newsweek "More phantasmagorical than anything by Poe or Kafka ... like a splash of ice water across the reader's face ... a psychological odyssey that should be remembered for a long time."
--Women's Wear Daily "A psychological masterpiece ... I don't know when I have been so moved by a book. I couldn't put it down. ... It breaks ground in the science of the human mind and at the same time provides the fascinating suspense of a top mystery thriller ... enthralling from the first scene to the last."
--Lucy Freeman "Masterly ... a book like no other we shall find this year, an amazing story."--Stephen Longstreet "Destined to stand as a significant landmark both in psychiatry and in literature."
--Dominic A. Barbara, M.d., F.a.p.a., American Journal of Psychiatry To my parents, Esther and William Schreiber Whose memory is a Dwelling place for All sweet thoughts and Harmonies.
CONTENTS
VOLUME I
The Family Tree: The Hierarchy of the Sixteen Selves Cast of Characters and Dates of "Birth"
Preface: Sybil Acknowledgments
Part I: Being
1 The Incomprehensible Clock
2 Wartime Within
3 The Couch and the Serpent
4 The Other Girl
5 Peggy Lou Baldwin
6 Victoria Antoinette Scharleau
7 Why
VOLUME II
Part I: Being
7 Why (continued)
Part II: Becoming
8 Willow Corners
9 Yesterday Was Never
10 Thieves of Time
11 The Search for the Center
12 Silent Witnesses
13 The Terror of Laughter
14 Hattie
15 Battered Child
16 Hattie's Fury Has a Beginning
VOLUME III
Part II: Becoming
16 Hattie's Fury Has a Beginning (continued)
17 Willard
Part III: Unbecoming
18 Confrontation and Verification
19 The Boys
20 The Voice of Orthodoxy
21 The Wine of Wrath
22 The Clock Comprehensible
23 The Retreating White Coat
24 Suicide
Part IV: Reentry
25 Beginning to Remember
VOLUME IV
Part IV: Reentry
25 Beginning to Remember (continued)
26 Independent Futures
27 Prisoners in Their Body
28 Journey to One
29 They Are Me, Too
30 Hate Heals
31 Ramon
32 One
Epilogue: The New Sybil's New Time Psychological
Index
SYBIL The Family Tree: The Hierarchy of the Sixteen Selves
SYBIL ISABEL DORSETT Vicky Marcia Vanessa Mary Helen Clara Sybil Ann The Blonde
SYBIL ISABEL DORSETT Peggy Ann Peggy Lou Mike Sid Nancy Lou Ann
SYBIL ISABEL DORSETT Marjorie Ruthie Cast of Characters and Dates of "Birth"
Sybil Isabel Dorsett (1923): a depleted person; the waking self.
Victoria Antoinette Scharleau (1926): nicknamed Vicky; a self-assured, sophisticated, attractive blonde; the memory trace of Sybil's selves.
Peggy Lou Baldwin (1926): an assertive, enthusiastic, and often angry pixie with a pug nose, a Dutch haircut, and a mischievous smile.
Peggy Ann Baldwin (1926): a counterpart of Peggy Lou with similar physical characteristics; she is more often fearful than angry.
Mary Lucinda Saunders Dorsett (1933): a thoughtful, contemplative, maternal, homeloving person; she is plump and has long dark-brown hair parted on the side.
Marcia Lynn Dorsett (1927): last name sometimes Baldwin; a writer and painter; extremely emotional; she has a shield-shaped face, gray eyes, and brown hair parted on the side.
Vanessa Gail Dorsett (1935): intensely dramatic and extremely attractive; a tall redhead with a willowy figure, light brown eyes, and an expressive oval face.
Mike Dorsett (1928): one of Sybil's two male selves; a builder and a carpenter; he has olive skin, dark hair, and brown eyes.
Sid Dorsett (1928): one of Sybil's two male selves; a carpenter and a general handyman; he has fair skin, dark hair, and blue eyes.
Nancy Lou Ann Baldwin (date undetermined): interested in politics as fulfillment of biblical prophecy and intensely afraid of Roman Catholics; fey; her physical characteristics resemble those of the Peggys.
Sybil Ann Dorsett (1928): listless to the point of neurasthenia; pale and timid with ash-blonde hair, an oval face, and a straight nose. Ruthie Dorsett (date undetermined): a baby; one of the lesser developed selves. Clara Dorsett (date undetermined): intensely religious; highly critical of the waking Sybil.
Helen Dorsett (1929): intensely afraid but determined to achieve fulfillment; she has light brown hair, hazel eyes, a straight nose, and thin lips. Marjorie Dorsett (1928): serene, vivacious, and quick to laugh; a tease; a small, willowy brunette with fair skin and a pug nose.
The Blonde (1946): nameless; a perpetual teenager; has blonde curly hair and a lilting voice.
The New Sybil (1965): the seventeenth self; an amalgam of the other sixteen selves.
Preface:
This book goes to press over ten years after I first met the woman to whom I have given the pseudonym Sybil Isabel Dorsett.
Sybil wants to maintain anonymity, and when you read her true story, you will understand why. But Sybil Isabel Dorsett is a real person.
Our first meeting took place on an autumn evening in 1962 at a restaurant on New York City's Madison Avenue. Dr. Cornelia B. Wilbur, Sybil's psychoanalyst, had arranged the meeting so that I could become acquainted with Sybil.
Sybil seemed constrained and remote. I knew that this was because of her illness. Dr. Wilbur and she had embarked on one of the most complex and most bizarre cases in the history of psychiatry--the first psychoanalysis of a multiple personality.
I had known about the case for some years. Dr. Wilbur's and my paths had often crossed through my work as psychiatry editor of Science Digest and as the author of articles about psychiatric subjects. A few of these articles, in fact, had been about her cases.
The meeting was arranged for a specific purpose: Dr. Wilbur wondered
whether I would be interested in writing about Sybil. It was not sufficient, the doctor believed, to present this history-making case in a medical journal, because in addition to great medical significance, the case had broad psychological and philosophical implications for the general public.
I wanted to wait for the outcome of the case prior to committing myself irrevocably to the book. In the meantime, Sybil and I became friends. We shared many intellectual interests, had an unmistakable affinity. Sybil became a frequent visitor in my apartment. She often confided in me about what had taken place in the analytic sessions, and what took place when she was in my home often found its way into the sessions.
Gradually, the idea of the book became more intriguing to me. I have written widely, and not without recognition, about psychiatry, and have a strong psychology and psychiatry background. By 1962 I had worked with many psychiatrists on their cases. Even my political profiles, many of which were written for national magazines, are strongly psychological in orientation. In addition, I am a college professor (currently at the City University of New York's John Jay College of Criminal Justice). My academic fields are English and speech; the literary bequest of the one and the closeness of speech scholarship to psychological scholarship prepared me to approach the subject of Sybil. Moreover, I had been in the theater, in radio and television, had written short stories and plays, and had taught writing at the New School for Social Research. All factors seemed to coalesce to make me want to transmute the clinical details of Sybil's story into a book in which I could capture that story's inherent drama.
I also wanted to write the book because of my friendship with Sybil and Dr. Wilbur, whose courage in pursuing the uncharted course of a very special analysis I greatly admired. I had great regard for Dr. Wilbur, an analyst with impressive credentials. She had a large Park Avenue practice and was prominent in a variety of psychiatric organizations, notably the Society of Medical Psychoanalysts and the Academy of Psychiatry. President of the National Association of Private Psychiatric Hospitals, she also served on the research committee of the Society of Medical Psychoanalysts that produced an important volume entitled Homosexuality: A Psychoanalytic View. Today, no longer in private practice, Dr. Wilbur is a full professor of psychiatry at the Medical School of the University of Kentucky.
Thus it was, after knowing Sybil and her other selves for three years, that I made my commitment and began to do formal research for this book. The confidences I shared with Sybil and Dr. Wilbur and my direct contacts with the other selves had to be supplemented by a systematized approach to the case as a whole and to Sybil's total life. I read widely in the medical literature about multiple personality, and I discussed the general aspects of the case with various psychiatrists in addition to Dr. Wilbur. I retraced the outer odyssey of Sybil's life by talking with persons who had known her in her midwestern home town, which I call Willow Corners, in Omaha, and in New York. I also literally retraced the steps Sybil had taken during some of her strange travels as another personality. In Philadelphia, for instance, I counted the number of steps to the front door of the Broadwood Hotel.
To unfold this extraordinary saga of a chilling, dizzying kaleidoscope of fascinating events, I had first to disentangle them. Clues evolved through a minute exploration of every single document connected with Sybil's eleven-year analysis. These included Dr. Wilbur's daily notes, jotted in pencil on prescription pads, in the course of 2,354 office sessions; Sybil's essays, written as part of the treatment procedure; and recordings of those analytic sessions that were taped. I also studied Sybil's diaries, kept from adolescence through the first year of the analysis; letters; family and hospital records; and the newspapers and records of the town of Willow Corners during the year in which the Dorsett family lived there.
Through these ten years--during seven of which I was actively working on the book--I was intimately associated with Dr. Wilbur and Sybil, both of whom, sometimes separately, sometimes together, stood ready to "sit" for the portrait. Our roles were quite distinct, however. I was recreating what Sybil had already lived and the doctor had already analyzed. But never, perhaps, did an author have more "giving" subjects. In fact, in response to any questioning, they, too, reassessed many aspects of the analysis. For me there was also the satisfaction of being able always to check the medical facts of this case with a doctor who was never farther away than the nearest telephone.
Upon reading the finished book, Sybil remarked, "Every emotion is true"; Dr. Wilbur commented, "Every psychiatric fact is accurately represented."
Sybil's true story provides a rare glimpse into the unconscious mind and opens doorways to new understanding. A reflection of abnormal psychology and of an extraordinary developmental pattern, the case of Sybil Dorsett supplies new insight into the normal. It affords not only a new observation of the uncanny power of the unconscious mind in motivating human behavior but also a new look into the dynamics of destructive family relationships, the crippling effects of a narrow, bigoted religious background, a woman's identification with the males in her family, and the denial of self-realization. In terms of what not to do, Sybil's story is a cogent lesson in child care. Implicit in this account, too, are issues relevant to such questions as: What is maturity? What is a whole person?
Sybil's life story also illuminates the role of the unconscious mind in creativity; the subtle interrelationships of remembering and forgetting, of the coexistence of the past with the present; and the significance of the primal scene in spawning psychoneurosis. There are also certain philosophical questions implicit here, namely, the subtle relationship between reality and unreality and the meaning of "I."
Medically this account throws light on the genesis of mental illness in terms of heredity and environment and the difference between schizophrenia, which some doctors and the public alike tend to use as a catch-all for a multitude of diverse symptoms, and Grande Hysterie, the little-understood illness with which Sybil was afflicted.
Most important of all, perhaps, is the expansion of consciousness that the reader experiences as he or she falls under the spell of Sybil's internal adventures.
Flora Rheta Schreiber New York City January, 1973
Acknowledgments
Thanks are in order to James Palmer for his useful comments on certain portions of the manuscript; to anthropologist Dr. Valentine Winsey for her invaluable suggestions; to Dr. Donald H. Riddle, President of John Jay College of Criminal Justice, for his sustained encouragement; to Melvin Herman, Executive Secretary of the National Association of Private Psychiatric Hospitals, who introduced me to Dr. Wilbur; to the Reverend Eric Hayden, of St. Andrews Church, Newark, for doing some crucial sleuthing; to Professor Leo C. Loughrey, for legal advice on Chapter 5; to John Schreiber for his unflagging enthusiasm for the project; to that loyal group of performers at the typewriter who gave seemingly endless hours not only to typing the manuscript but also to empathizing with the author--Natalie Parnass, Margaret Schoppe, Janet Ludorf K@uby, Susi Resnick, Shirley Sulat, Anne Henri, and Haydee Davis; to Haydee, too, who, along with her husband, George Thomas, bailed the author, laden with documents, out of Lexington, Kentucky; to Patricia Myrer of McIntosh and Otis for weathering the storm since 1962; and above all to Dr. Cornelia B. Wilbur and Sybil I.
Dorsett, who made it all possible.
I have also discussed Sybil's case with such notable members of the psychiatric fraternity as Dr. Karl Menninger, Dr. Murray Bowen, Dr. Harvey Kay, Dr. Lawrence Friedman, and the late Dr. Nathan Ackerman. Dr. Herbert Spiegel, who did age regressions on Sybil and described her as "a brilliant hysteric," gave several hours to a valuable discussion of this case, which he knew first-hand. Dr. Menninger, who had never treated anyone with Sybil's condition, had, however, dealt with cases of automatic writing, which he regards as a subdivision of the condition, attesting to its reality. Dr. Bowen, whose specialty is family therapy, was particularly concerned with the family constellation in the genesis of the illness.
Part I Being<
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1
The Incomprehensible Clock
The crash of glass made her head throb. The room swirled. Her nostrils were suffused with the acrid smell of chemicals, more than an inhalation of what was actually there. The smell seemed to emerge from some far-off memory of an experience long forgotten. That smell, so distant yet so familiar, was reminiscent of the old drugstore at home.
The broken glass in the old drugstore. The broken glass in the big dining room. Both times there had been the accusing voice: "You broke it."
Sybil Isabel Dorsett hastily flung her chemistry notes into her brown zipper folder and rushed to the door, with all eyes upon her, the chemistry professor's, the other students', uncomprehendingly engraving themselves into her spine.
The door closed behind her. She was in the long, dusky hall on the third floor of Columbia University's Havemeyer Hall. Then she was waiting at the elevator, the only person there.
"Too long, too long." Her thoughts spun round. She had waited too long before leaving the lab. She might have prevented what had happened by leaving the very moment that she heard the crash.
Too long. The elevator, too, was taking too long.
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