Sybil

by Flora Rheta Schreiber

  It was the tinge of sadness in Marian's eyes that proved most compelling to Vicky, who, in spite of the fact that she herself was a happy person, had had long experience in responding to the sadness of another. Vicky's empathy had quickened their friendship.

  If Marian had a daughter, Vicky thought surely, it should have been I. We would have put an end to the generation gap. Though Marian is old enough to be my mother, the years make no difference at all.

  "Let's go," Marian was saying. "They'll be out of everything if we don't."

  They walked through the immense room toward the food counter. "Cafeteria food on marble tables," Vicky remarked, as Marian, obviously concerned with the contours of her excellent figure, reached for a salad of sliced pineapple and cottage cheese. "It gives a pedestrian flavor to a continental atmosphere." Vicky, slender beyond her desire because Sybil kept her that way, selected macaroni and cheese.

  Back at the table beside the rectangular pool, Vicky and Marian talked of silk-weaving in France, the subject of a term paper Marian was preparing. "You know so much about it," Marian said, "I'm certain you can give me invaluable advice." And so they talked of early inventories of the royal furniture repository of Louis XIV, of how the first known material to originate in France was a piece of velvet having the crown as an emblem, dating from the reign of either Henry IV or Louis XIII. "If you can establish which king it is," Vicky said, "you'll have a coup."

  The conversation turned to the pictorial and landscape patterns that had reemerged during the early eighteenth-century period as a result of the rediscovery of Chinese motifs. "Did you know," Vicky asked, "that these artists were very much under the influence of Boucher, Pillement, and Watteau?"

  "And weren't those artists influenced by the Chinese motifs of Meissen porcelain?" Marian asked. "That was the period of Chinese influence, after all."

  "I give you an A," Vicky said with a smile.

  Marian finished her coffee, Vicky her hot chocolate. Marian lit a cigarette and remarked, "I'm glad you don't smoke. Don't ever start."

  "There's little fear of that," Vicky replied. "It's not one of my vices."

  "I haven't noticed any others," Marian teased.

  "You'll have to look harder," Vicky replied in the same spirit.

  "Well," said Marian, "we have our jewelry class at six. That gives us just time to see "Word Becomes Image.""

  The exhibit, which was in the Great Hall, was intriguing. There were interpretations by American and European artists from Durer to Alexander Calder of scenes and characters in some of the world's best-known literary masterpieces-- Aesop's Fables, Dante's Inferno, Faust, Don Quixote, Hamlet, and King Lear, The Eclogues of Virgil, and the legends from Ovid's Metamorphoses. Among the biblical illustrations was an interpretation of the beasts with seven heads and ten horns from the Apocalypse engraved by Jean Duvet in the sixteenth century.

  Lingering over the Duvet work, Vicky remarked, "I used to paint beasts."

  "You've never mentioned it," Marian said. "No. It was back in Omaha some ten years ago when I used to illustrate our pastor's fiery sermons about the beasts rising from the sea."

  "I'm glad to hear you talk about your painting," Marian replied. "You've always been so reticent about it, Sybil."

  Sybil. The mention of that name didn't really disturb Vicky. That was the only name by which Marian and everyone else knew her--the name on identification cards and checks, in mail boxes, telephone books, in registrars' offices. As a realist Vicky had always accepted these as facts of her unique existence.

  Victoria Scharleau couldn't disavow the name even though it actually belonged to "the other girl," as Peggy Lou called her. It was the name of the lean, frightened figure who was never seen at a time like this, among people, relaxed and happy. The real bearer of the name Sybil was the reserved, contracted being who walked alone and who, Vicky knew, was seeking a self that to her not only had come naturally but also was the substance of her very existence.

  So she was used to the idea of "Sybil." She was discomforted more by the fact that she knew that it was this other Sybil, more than she, who, along with some of the others--those whom Vicky had mentioned to Dr. Wilbur--had really painted the beasts. Vicky felt that even in casual conversation she had been wrong in claiming those paintings as her own.

  "I'm reticent about my paintings," Vicky said aloud, "because I know better painters than I."

  "Well," Marian replied, "that's always true. By that standard no artist would ever have any sense of according-complishment. But you're no slouch. After all, the head of the art department said that he hasn't had anyone in the department with as much talent as you have for better than twenty years."

  "Marian, let's change the subject,"

  Vicky replied uneasily.

  It was impossible for Vicky to accept the professor's evaluation of the work of the total Sybil Dorsett as her own. Sybil painted, Vicky painted, and so did most of the other selves of Sybil. Of them all, Sybil, in Vicky's opinion, was the most gifted painter. This ability had manifested itself in childhood. When Sybil's art teachers were impressed by her work, her parents had been confounded until her father had taken her work to be evaluated by an art critic in St. Paul, Minnesota. Only then was there parental acceptance of Sybil's ability. In high school and college Sybil had commanded good sums for her paintings, which were exhibited in prestigious places.

  None of the paintings, of course, was Sybil's alone. Most were collaborative efforts of several of the selves. Collaboration had proved constructive at times, destructive at others.

  But despite diversity of styles and tell-tale lapses in the paintings, Sybil--the total Sybil Dorsett with Sybil herself as the dominant painter--had always had the potentiality of being an important artist. And although that potentiality was never realized became of the psychological problems that deflected Sybil from that course, there had been realization enough for the Columbia art professor to regard Sybil-- as Marian had reported--as the most gifted student who had been in the department in the course of over twenty years.

  As these thoughts moved through Vicky's mind, she realized how impossible it was to explain her feelings of reticence about talking about her--their-- paintings to Marian Ludlow or anyone else who thought that there was just one artist answering to the name of Sybil Dorsett.

  Vicky and Marian had an early dinner on the roof restaurant at Butler Hall, an apartment hotel near the Columbia campus. Marian ordered Salisbury steak, and Vicky had spaghetti and meat balls. Then they went to the six o'clock jewelry class.

  The jewelry class was a place to which Vicky went because Sybil couldn't. Taking place in a basement aglow with blow torches used by Vulcanian figures wearing goggles and black aprons, the class stirred in Sybil memories of Willow Corners. And the memories reawakened old, unresolved fears.

  Vicky, stepping into the breach when Sybil blacked out or, as tonight, attending the class on her own because she was in the ascendancy, not only was making an A in the subject but also was helping Marian, who had little previous experience, to score an A.

  Vicky always enjoyed this class. Some nights she sketched designs for jewelry or executed the designs she had already sketched. This night she was making a link necklace of copper and was helping Marian with a silver pendant.

  After class Vicky and Marian went back to Vicky's dormitory room, in which lights from other rooms, turning on and off, were reflected in the window facing the courtyard. Vicky turned on the radio, and they listened to the news and to "The Great Gildersleeve." As the evening came to a close and Marian was getting ready to leave, Vicky very cautiously began putting away the jewelry supplies they had brought back with them. She was determined to leave the room exactly as it had been before they started working.

  "Why are you so fussy?" Marian asked. "You room alone. These things won't bother anybody."

  "Yes, I know," Vicky replied with a wry smile. Then, trying to disguise her feelings, she chatted amiably with Marian as they walked to
the door.

  After Marian was gone, Vicky thought of the time that Sybil had brought a sample sketch to Dr. Wilbur's office and had told the doctor that she was afraid to use the sketch because she didn't know if it had come out of a book or just where it came from. It had been Vicky's sketch. Thinking how disturbed Sybil had been then and how disturbed she would also be if she found any jewelry supplies in the room, Vicky wanted to protect her from another terrifying discovery. Vicky thought: "I live alone yet not alone."

  And Vicky felt that she was moving toward the shadows of something from which she had been free almost all day.

  Sybil was in her dormitory room, studying for an exam in Professor Roma Gans's education course. There was a knock on the door. She thought that it was Teddy Reeves. Standing at the door, however, was not Teddy but a tall, good-looking woman with bright brown hair and bright brown eyes, a woman who was probably in her early forties. Sybil didn't know the woman.

  "I can't stay," the woman said, "I'm late for a hairdresser's appointment. Since I knew I'd be passing here, I thought I'd stop and give you this. You've done so much for me, Sybil. I want you to have it."

  The woman handed Sybil a lovely handcrafted silver pendant with a beautiful blue stone, lapis lazuli. I don't know why she's giving me this, Sybil thought. "Thank you," she replied faintly as she hesitatingly accepted the pendant.

  "See you soon," the woman said and was gone. See you soon? Done so much for her? It's so unreal. Have I spoken to her before? I've seen her around, but we have never exchanged a single word.

  Yet she acted as if we were friends. Friends? The confusion raged.

  Return to the desk. Try to study.

  Sybil found herself clinging to realities. Even while she did so, however, she realized that the time-honored conundrum, the terrible thing, had overtaken her again. It had been the reality of her life to have something happen that had no beginning and to experience the painfully familiar "This is where I came in" feeling, with its tantalizing withholding of everything that had gone before.

  Study for the exam. As Sybil sat at her desk, however, the pages of the education text blurred with her panic, and she asked herself fervently: Will there never be an end that also has a beginning? Will there never be continuity bridging the awful void between now and some other time, a time in the future, a time in the past?

  Victoria Antoinette Scharleau, who knew everything, watched Marian Ludlow give Sybil the silver pendant.

  7

  Why

  Dr. Wilbur adjusted her desk lamp beam a fraction. Before her was almost the whole of the relatively sparse literature about multiple personality. In a pensive mood after Vicky had left her office, she had made a trip to the Academy of Medicine Library, where a librarian had assembled for her almost everything there was on this definitely established but rare illness. Morton Prince's The Dissociation of a Personality, first published in 1905, which is well known to students of abnormal psychology, was the only one of the books she had read before. She had tried to get hold of a copy of Dr. Corbey H. Thigpen's and Dr. Hervey Cleckley's 1954 article: "A Case of Multiple Personality" in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology, about which some of her colleagues were talking. But this article, about a girl whose pseudonym was Eve, had not been available at the time.

  Now, however, as she read into the night, the names Mary Reynolds, Mamie, Felida X, Louis Vive, Ansel Bourne, Miss Smith, Mrs. Smead, Silas Prong, Doris Fisher, and Christine Beauchamp became known to the doctor. These were the people with multiple personalities whom medical history had recorded: seven women and three men. [Others have been recorded since.] The newly reported case of Eve made it eight women, and Eve was the only multiple personality known to be alive.

  Mary Reynolds, the doctor learned, was the first recorded multiple personality. Her case had been reported in 1811 by Dr. L. Mitchell, of the University of Pennsylvania.

  Mamie's case had been described in the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal of May 15, 1890. Following that had come reports of Felida X by M. Azam; of Louis Vive, studied by several French observers; of Ansel Bourne, observed by Dr. Richard Hodgson and by Professor William James; of Miss Smith, by M. Flournoy; and of Mrs. Smead, by Professor Hyslop. In 1920, as part of a volume entitled The Ungeared Mind, by Robert Howland Chase, there had been the recapitulation of "The Strange Case of Silas Prong," a ease of multiple personality previously described by Professor William James.

  The complexity of these cases, the doctor realized even after a cursory glance, varied markedly. In cases like those of Miss Smith and Mrs. Smead, which involved dual rather than multiple personalities, the secondary personality, while possessing the faculties of a full human being, exhibited very little independence in voluntarily moving about in a social world--working, acting, and playing. Clearly this characteristic was not true of Sybil. Her alternating personalities were obviously autonomous.

  Cases like those of Felida X, Christine Beauchamp, and Doris Fisher were more interesting, for they were examples of independent personalities in the same body, leading their own lives as any other mortal. Miss Beauchamp had three selves; Doris Fisher, five. It was to this type, the doctor speculated, that Sybil belonged. But Sybil's case--again it was only speculation--seemed more complex than that either of Miss Beauchamp or of Doris Fisher.

  Well, if it is, it is, the doctor thought, hypothesizing that in Sybil's case there were probably multiple roots. What those roots were, however, was at this stage unknown.

  For a time Dr. Wilbur pondered. Then, beginning to read again, she searched for when, in these other cases, the first dissociation had taken place. She had no idea of when Sybil had dissociated for the first time and whether all the personalities had emerged then or whether some had come later. When had Christine Beauchamp first dissociated? According to Prince, it had taken place when Christine was eighteen and as the result of a nervous shock.

  Dr. Wilbur didn't actually know, but she surmised that Sybil's first dissociation had taken place during her childhood. The childishness of Peggy seemed to be a clue. And probably there had been a shock for Sybil, too. But what? So little had been revealed that it was all but impossible even to speculate about causes. But, hypothesizing, the doctor thought that possibly there had been multiple roots, or shocks, leading to multiple selves, personifying reactions to those shocks. Many other selves could thus be translated into multiple childhood traumas, multiple roots sprouting into this complex condition.

  The Dorsett case was taking on the aspect of an adventure, a whodunit of the unconscious, and Dr. Wilbur became even more excited when she realized that Sybil was the first multiple personality to be psychoanalyzed. This meant that not only would they be breaking new ground, but also that the doctor, through psychoanalysis, would be able to bring a much greater psychological sophistication to an understanding of Sybil than had been available hitherto. Dr. Wilbur's pulse quickened at the challenge and at its possible implications not only for Sybil but for the largely unchartered field of multiple personality.

  The analysis, Dr. Wilbur decided, would have to be an unorthodox one. She smiled as she thought; an unorthodox analysis by a maverick psychiatrist. She did consider herself a maverick and knew that it was this characteristic that would stand her in good stead in dealing with this extraordinary case. She knew that she would have to utilize the spontaneous reactions of all the selves not only in uncovering the origin of the illness, but also in treating it. She knew that it would be necessary to treat each of the selves as a person in her own right and to winnow away the reserve of Sybil, the waking self. Otherwise the total Sybil Dorsett would never get well. The doctor knew, too, that she would have to make tremendous sacrifices of time and modify her usual consulting-room Freudian techniques to the harnessing of every shred of spontaneity that would help her break through to the truth that lay concealed behind these selves.

  The pivotal question was: why had Sybil become a multiple personality? Is there a physical predisposition toward the
development of a multiple personality? Do genetic factors play a part? No one knew. The doctor believed, however, that Sybil's condition stemmed from some childhood trauma, though at this stage she couldn't be certain. To date analysis had revealed certain pervading fears--of getting close to people, of music, of hands --that seemed connected with a trauma. Telltale, too, were the seething rage, repressed in Sybil but bursting forth unbridled in Peggy Lou, and the denial of mother in both Peggy Lou and Vicky. The feeling of entrapment strongly suggested trauma.

  Many characteristics were common to several of the cases. The waking self, corresponding to the Sybil who had presented herself in Omaha and New York, typically seemed reserved and overnice. The doctor hypothesized that perhaps it was the very repression in this kind of temperament that made it necessary to relegate the emotions that had been repressed to another personality. The books talked of the secondary selves as depleting the waking self of emotions, attitudes, modes of behavior, and acquisitions.

  But depletion was the effect, not the cause, of the condition. What in Sybil's case had caused it? What was the original trauma?

  In the morning Dr. Wilbur approached the Dorsett appointment hour, as she now always did, wondering "who" would be there. It was Vicky. That was a good start, for Vicky claimed to know everything about the case.

  Hunting for the original trauma, the doctor asked Vicky, on this her second appearance in the office, just two days after the first, whether she knew why Peggy Lou was afraid of music, as had become evident in a recent session, and why music deeply disturbed her.

  "Music hurts," Vicky replied, elevating her eyebrows and looking at the doctor through the thin wreaths of smoke that came from the doctor's cigarette. "It hurts way inside because it is beautiful, and it makes both Sybil and Peggy Lou sad. They're sad because they're alone and nobody cares. When they hear music, they feel more alone than ever."

  Could this, the doctor thought, relate to the original trauma? Possibly it involved the lack of caring, perhaps the lack of nurturing. When she asked why something beautiful should hurt, Vicky replied cryptically: "It's like love."