Sybil

by Flora Rheta Schreiber

  Then, looking steadily at Vicky, the doctor asked, "Was there something about love that hurt?"

  "There was," Vicky replied straightforwardly yet cautiously.

  When the doctor asked how precisely love had hurt, Vicky became even more cautious. "Doctor," she said, "Sybil doesn't want to love anybody. It's because she's afraid of getting close to people. You've seen how she's been here. It's all part of the same mosaic--the fear of hands coming at her, the fear of people, the fear of music, the fear of love. All have hurt her. All have made her afraid. All have made her sad and alone."

  The doctor, very much aware that Vicky was describing the very symptoms, with the addition of love, that she herself had pondered the night before, wished that this co-analyzed of hers would get down to causes. "Vicky," she asked in an oblique attempt to steer her in that direction, "do you share any of these fears?"

  "Certainly not," Vicky replied.

  "Why is Sybil afraid when you're not?" the doctor persisted.

  "That is an essential difference between Sybil and me. I can do what I want to do because I'm not afraid."

  "But why aren't you?"

  "I have no reason to be, and that's why I'm not." That was as far as Vicky would commit herself. "Poor Sybil," she sighed, changing the thrust of the conversation, "what a trial it has been. She's all choked up. She has an almost constant pain in her head and her throat. She can't cry. And she won't. Everyone was against her when she cried."

  "Who is everyone?" the doctor asked hopefully.

  "Oh, I'd rather not say," Vicky replied with a cautious smile. "After all, I was not a member of the family. I only lived with them."

  Victoria Antoinette Scharleau closed the door that had swung at least partly ajar. Yet there had been a ray of light. The lack of caring, perhaps the lack of nurturing that the doctor had begun to suspect, had assumed greater probability with Vicky's placing the blame for Sybil's inability to cry squarely within the Dorsett family.

  Things happened so fast. As Dr. Wilbur pondered this last thought, all at once, noiselessly and with a transition so slight as to be almost imperceptible, the assurance of Victoria Antoinette Scharleau slipped. The aplomb that was characteristic of her disappeared. The eyes that had been serene dilated with the fears that had been recounted. Vicky, who was not a member of the Dorsett family, had returned the body to Sybil, who was.

  Startled at finding herself on the couch, sitting close to the doctor, Sybil moved abruptly away. "What happened?" she asked. "I don't remember coming here today. Another fugue?"

  Dr. Wilbur nodded. This, she decided, was the moment to spell out what these fugues really were. The analysis would proceed more rapidly, she believed, if Sybil knew about the other selves. Then the doctor could confront her with what the other personalities had said and bring her closer to the memories from which she seemed barred.

  "Yes," the doctor told Sybil. "You had another fugue. But it's more complicated than that."

  "I'm afraid."

  "Of course you are, sweetie," the doctor replied consolingly. "Now tell me, you've never said this to me, but I think you're aware that time goes by without your knowing that it has." Sybil was rigid. "Are you?" When Sybil didn't answer, the doctor persisted: "You know that you have lost time here?"

  After a long pause Sybil replied in subdued tones, "I promised myself I would tell you, but I haven't dared."

  Then the doctor asked: "What do you think you do in the time you lose?"

  "Do?" Sybil replied. The doctor could see that it was an echo more than a concept. "I don't do anything."

  "You go right on saying or doing something, even though you're not aware of saying or doing it." The doctor was unrelenting. "It's like walking in your sleep."

  "What do I do?"

  "Did anyone ever tell you?"

  "Well, yes." Sybil lowered her eyes. "All my life I've been told that I had done certain things that I knew I hadn't. I let it go. What else could I do?"

  "Who are some of the people who told you?"

  "Almost everybody all the time."

  "Who?"

  "Well, my mother always said I was a bad girl. I never knew what I had done that was bad. She would shake me. I'd ask what I had done. She'd holler, "You know perfectly well what you did, young lady!" But I didn't know. I don't know now."

  "Try not to be too worried," the doctor said gently. "Other people have had it. We can take care of it. It's treatable." Dr. Wilbur could see that this statement had made an enormous impression on Sybil. She seemed more relaxed.

  "This condition," the doctor went on to explain, "is more complicated than the fugue states we've already discussed. In a simple fugue there's just a loss of consciousness, but your fugues are not blank."

  "I've always called them my blank spells," Sybil said. "To myself, that is, never to anyone else."

  "While you yourself lose consciousness," the doctor continued, "another person takes over for you."

  "Another person?" Sybil asked, stunned. The question was again mere echo.

  "Yes," the doctor replied. She started to explain, but Sybil interrupted.

  "Then I'm like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde?"

  Dr. Wilbur slapped her hand in her fist. "That's not a true story," she said. "It's pure fiction. You're not at all like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Stevenson wasn't a psychoanalyst. He created those two characters out of his literary imagination. As a writer he was concerned only with spinning a good yarn."

  "May I go now? We're running over," Sybil suddenly said, the pressure on her almost unendurable.

  But Dr. Wilbur pressed on relentlessly. She knew that having committed herself, she had to go all the way. "You're too intelligent to subscribe to the popular misconception that has evolved from fiction," she said. "The facts are quite different. I've been reading about other people who have this condition. They don't have a good side and a bad side. They're not torn by the conflict between good and evil.

  "Not a great deal is known about this condition. But we do know that the different selves of any one person are likely to share the same ethical code, the same basic moral structure."

  "We're running over," Sybil insisted. "I have no right to extra time."

  "That's what you always do, Sybil," Dr. Wilbur replied firmly. "Declare yourself unworthy. That's one of the reasons you need other personalities."

  "Personalities?" Sybil echoed fearfully. "Did you say "personalities"? Plural?"

  "Sybil," the doctor said gently, "this is nothing to be afraid of. There's a personality who calls herself Peggy Lou. She's self-assertive. There's Peggy Ann, who also is a fighter, but she is more tactful than Peggy Lou. The other calls herself Vicky. She's assured, at ease, responsible, a very delightful person."

  Sybil rose to go.

  "There's nothing to be afraid of," the doctor repeated.

  But Sybil's pleading "Let me go, please let me go" showed that she had been profoundly shaken. Thinking it unwise to let her leave alone, the doctor offered to walk out with her.

  "You have another patient," Sybil insisted. "I'll be all right." Walking out the door through which only an hour before a radiant Vicky had entered, Sybil was pale as a cod.

  Later, in the gathering dark of her silent office, Dr. Wilbur speculated about the Dorsett case. Sybil had remained herself throughout the interview. Now that she knew about the other personalities, the first analysis in history of a multiple personality was about to begin in earnest. She turned again to the volumes about multiple personality that cluttered her desk, and she also took copies of Freud and Charcot from her shelves, combing the familiar references to hysteria.

  Even though multiple personality was a bizarre and abnormal phenomenon, it was, Dr. Wilbur was certain, not a psychosis but a hysterical condition. This growing realization renewed her confidence in being able to handle the case; for although she had never treated a multiple personality, she had not only treated but had had many successes in treating hysterics. Her experience with hysterics ha
d, in fact, begun so early in her career that the Omaha internist who had sent Sybil Dorsett to her in the first place had done so because of her success in treating patients with hysterical symptoms.

  Multiple personality, it had become evident to Dr. Wilbur, belongs to the class of patients known as psychoneurotics. The specific neurosis is grande hysterie. The kind of grande hysterie from which Sybil Dorsett suffered, not only with multiple personalities but with a variety of psychosomatic illnesses and disturbances in the five senses, was as grave as it was rare.

  Dr. Wilbur had seen schizophrenics-- psychotics--who had not been as ill as Sybil. One might say that they were running a psychotic temperature of 99 degrees, whereas Sybil has been running a psychoneurotic temperature of 105 degrees, thought Dr. Wilbur. Though a psychosis is a more severe illness, the point is: How ill is the patient? It is not: How serious is the patient's illness?

  There is no reason to be discouraged, Dr. Wilbur assured herself. Maybe she was being brash in thinking that Sybil Dorsett would get well. But it was an extremely complicated case, and it would take brashness to stick with it and see it through.

  The phone rang. It was after ten. Probably a patient in a crisis, calling for help. Please, not a suicide tonight, she thought. When the day was done, she needed an interval to cleanse psychoses and psychoneuroses out of her system, to stop living other people's lives. She wanted more time for her husband, for professional meetings, to visit with relatives and friends, to read and think, to have her hair done and go shopping. So often these commonplace activities had to be thrown aside because of a patient's sudden, urgent need.

  She picked up the phone. It was Teddy Reeves. "Dr. Wilbur," Teddy reported, "Sybil Dorsett fell apart.

  She really blew. I don't know what to do for her."

  "I'll come right over," Dr. Wilbur volunteered. As she placed the phone back in its cradle, she wasn't really surprised at what Teddy Reeves had told her. She suspected that what Teddy had meant by "she really blew" was that Peggy Lou had taken over.

  When Sybil finally admitted to the doctor that she had lost time, it had been an admission also to herself. Never before, despite all the years of gyrating from now to some other time, with minutes, days, weeks, years unaccounted for, had she ever formulated the idea of "lost time." Instead she had used the circumlocution: "blank spells."

  However, the shiver that went through her body when the doctor told her, "While you yourself lose consciousness, another personality takes over for you," hadn't been fear. It was recognition. That sentence explained the things, good and bad, that people had said she had done, but which she hadn't, the strangers who said that they knew her. Embarrassed that the doctor would find out about all the terrible things, the evil things about which perhaps the doctor knew already but wasn't telling, she had fled from the office, haunted by self-accusation.

  Whittier Hall at first brought surcease. The meeting in the dormitory elevator with Judy and Marlene, the twins she was tutoring, became a new affront, a new accusation. Inseparable, complete as an entity, one, they had spent a lifetime together, whereas she had not even spent all her time with herself!

  She fumbled for her key, but with her unsteady hand she could not insert the key in the lock. Not trusting herself to negotiate the room alone she tapped feebly at the door of Teddy Reeves's room.

  Teddy put Sybil to bed and, standing by in terror and compassion, watched as Sybil, getting in and out of bed, also went in and out of a series of what appeared to be disparate was moods. One moment she was a ranting child, walking on the furniture, leaving her fingerprints on the ceiling. The next moment she was a self-possessed and knowing woman, talking of herself in the third person and saying, "I'm glad Sybil knows. Yes, indeed, it will be better for all of us this way." Then Sybil became the quaking person, the one who had tapped at Teddy's door. She was lying inert on the bed when the doctor arrived.

  Dr. Wilbur could see that Sybil was suffering, and she tried to reassure Sybil by explaining that having other selves was nothing to be afraid of because it was just a form of what psychiatrists call "acting out": lots of people act out what troubles them.

  It didn't work. Indeed, when, far from being reassured, Sybil protested, "I've never heard of one person who does that," the doctor began to question whether, even after all the delays, she had been too precipitous in the way she had sprung on Sybil the knowledge of the other selves.

  "I'll give you a seconal," the doctor reassured her, "and you'll be fine in the morning." The doctor had discovered that barbiturate sedatives relieved Sybil's anxiety for forty-eight hours.

  Morning came. Sybil awakened, freed of anxiety by the seconal the doctor had given her the night before. The multiple selves seemed like a nightmare that had receded.

  It was well past midnight when the doctor left Whittier Hall. Although by no means certain what the alternating personalities actually represented, she hypothesized that the waking Sybil more or less corresponded to the conscious mind and that the alternating selves belonged to the unconscious. Borrowing an image from anatomy and biology, she saw the alternating personalities as lacunae--the very small cavities in bone that are filled with bone cells --in the unconscious of Sybil. Sometimes quiescent, these lacunae, with proper stimulation, emerged and lived. They functioned within Sybil but also in the outside world, where they seemed to act out the particular problem they were defending.

  Defenses in the unconscious, the doctor thought as she paid the taxi driver. Now what I have to do is to become acquainted with each of the personalities, no matter how many there are, and to determine with what conflict each of them deals. This will take me to the roots of the trauma that made necessary the dissociation. This way I can get to the reality--an intolerable reality, I suspect--against which the selves have become a defensive maneuver.

  The analysis, the doctor realized, will, of course, have to include all the personalities, and each of them will have to be analyzed both as an autonomous human being and as part of the total Sybil Dorsett.

  What was of more immediate importance was to get closer to the waking Sybil. That was the only way to get around the anxiety and defensiveness behind which the other selves lay in ambush.

  But how does one get closer to this remote and timid Sybil Dorsett?

  "Sybil," Dr. Wilbur asked one morning in April, 1955, when Sybil had brought some of her water colors to the office, "how would you like to drive up with me to Connecticut some Sunday during the dogwood season? The countryside is lovely then, and you can sketch the flowering trees and shrubs."

  Dammit, the doctor thought, as Sybil replied diffidently, "Oh, you have more important things to do than to spend a Sunday with me," I must make her understand that I regard her as an extraordinarily gifted woman, that I would enjoy being with her even if she weren't my patient. Is there no way of making her realize that even though she is extremely handicapped by her illness, I don't think less of her? Will she never understand that in spite of the fact that she undervalues herself to a marked degree, I do not undervalue her?

  Indeed, it was only after much argument that Dr. Wilbur was able to persuade Sybil to agree to the trip--the trip that could, Dr. Wilbur was sure, make Sybil gain confidence and thaw.

  As Dr. Wilbur drove up to Whittier Hall at 7:00 a.m. on a sunny Sunday in early May, 1955, she saw that Sybil was waiting with Teddy Reeves. Teddy, who had always manifested a proprietary interest in Sybil, had become even more possessive after Sybil had taken her self-confidence about the multiple selves. Not knowing about them that night in March when she called Dr. Wilbur, Teddy now not only was able to recognize Vicky and Peggy Lou but also had set about building a relationship with them. Standing with Sybil in front of Whittier Hall, Teddy noted that the top of the doctor's convertible was down, and she fussed about whether Sybil had a scarf to protect her against the elements. When Sybil said that she had, Teddy cautioned that even so it was too cool to drive with the top of the car down. And although both Sybil and the do
ctor assured her that they would be all right, she remained unconvinced. But Teddy's greatest concerns were whether during the trip Peggy Lou was going to remain quiet and through how much of the outing Sybil would be Sybil.

  For her part, Sybil seemed very much herself as she waved goodbye to Teddy and stepped into the doctor's convertible. In her navy blue suit and red hat she looked attractive and more at ease than the doctor had ever seen her.

  The way that Sybil had concealed her pleasure in the trip until after they had left Teddy did not escape the doctor, who thought it both sensitive and thoughtful of Sybil to be aware of Teddy's envy and to guard against it.

  Wanting the occasion to be purely social, Dr. Wilbur confined the conversation to the here and now, to the towns and houses they passed, to the geography and history of the land, and to the scenery. They skirted the small shore cities, turned off at Southport, and drove directly to the Sound. "I've always wanted to draw and paint boats," Sybil remarked as she looked at the boats in the Sound for the first time, "but I've always felt that I couldn't get the shapes right."

  "Try," said the doctor as she stopped the car. Seated in the parked car, Sybil made some sketches of sail boats anchored at the marina.

  "I like the sketches," the doctor said. Sybil seemed pleased.

  Leaving the Sound, Dr. Wilbur drove in a leisurely way back and forth on various highways and on old country roads with little traffic. To Sybil, who had never been in this part of the country before, she pointed out that some of the houses they passed were prerevolutionary, while some of the others, although modern, had either original prerevolutionary windows or replicas of such windows. Sybil remarked:

  "My father's a builder-contractor. He's very much interested in architecture, and he developed my interest." The father had scarcely been mentioned in the analysis, and Dr. Wilbur was glad to hear about him.