Both Mike and Sid were capable of anger, but it was an anger that was more controlled, less furious than that of Peggy Lou, though it turned out to be linked with Peggy Lou. Mike and Sid, Dr. Wilbur discovered, were Peggy Lou's progeny, a part of a family tree unconnected with genetic inheritance, an offshoot of emotional functioning, of the defensive maneuvers to which the alternating selves owed their existence.
As the mastermind behind Mike and Sid, Peggy Lou delegated her feelings to them. By a curious phenomenon, Sybil had lost the emotions, attitudes, and acquisitions she bequeathed to the personalities into whom she had dissociated whereas Peggy Lou, in proliferating into subselves, among whom were Mike and Sid, lost nothing of what she delegated to them. That Mike was the product of Peggy Lou's wish became clear in a conversation between Dr. Wilbur and Vicky.
"Peggy Lou," Vicky said, "is angry about sex because of her mother's refusal to explain the facts of life. Sometimes Peggy Lou used to say that she was a boy and that her name was Mike. Whenever she thought she was a boy, she wore blue coveralls and a red sweater and did things with tools. She played like the boys and tried to do everything that boys do. But then she would get mad because she knew she wasn't. Even today it makes her mad to know she's a girl. It makes her simply furious because she wants children and wants to get married when she's old enough. She wants to be the man. She wants to be the man she marries when she's old enough."
Identified with Willard and Aubrey Dorsett, emotional descendants of Peggy Lou, Mike and Sid, these boys in a woman's body, were also mythological figures, the compensatory answer to the myth of woman's inferiority, particularly as enunciated in the benighted world of Willow Corners.
Although Mike and Sid epitomized the antifeminist view that women slink through life with secret masculine yearnings, a penis envy so strong that it becomes penis identification, and a woman's capacity for self-derogation so virulent as utterly to repudiate femininity, their feelings were rooted in the environmental influences of a milieu and were rejected by genetic, medical, and psychological evidence. These boys without penises were perhaps the objectification of a woman's rebellion not so much at being female as at the connotations of femaleness evoked by the retarded culture of Willow Corners. That rebellion, moreover, as Mike had made clear in saying, "I don't want to be a dirty girl like our mother," was a revulsion against the distortions about sex a mother had created. Loathing the femaleness that was her mother, a loathing intensified by her father's puritanism, Sybil extended that loathing to the femaleness that was self, to the body that her mother had violated.
"Now, in this body--your body, Mike,"
Dr. Wilbur had said, "there is a pair of ovaries, where the eggs are."
And Mike had replied, "I don't want them."
Mike and Sid were also autonomous beings, with emotions of their own. Mike's urgent need "to give a girl a baby" was an expression of that autonomy. But though both, denying that the body in which they lived was alien to their desires, thought and acted as free agents, it was a limited, uncertain freedom. Moreover, analysis threatened their freedom, for regarding the boys' presentation of themselves as a serious complication in a case already overloaded with complications and already following a halting course, Dr. Wilbur was determined to fuse Mike and Sid into the feminine whole they so resolutely rejected as soon as possible.
Mike's initial question, "How come?" had produced an answer rooted in multiple origins. Perhaps there was also a subtle answer in the fact that the unconscious, to which Mike and Sid, like the other alternating selves, belonged, doesn't draw the sexual distinctions that a stratified society imposes.
The uniqueness, which, before, was based on Sybil's having developed more alternating selves than had any other known multiple personality, was now founded as well on her being the only multiple personality to have crossed the borders of sexual difference to develop personalities of the opposite sex.
No known male multiple personality had developed female selves. Sybil Dorsett was the only known woman multiple personality whose entourage of alternating selves included males.
Since 1957, other multiple personalities who have developed selves of the opposite sex have been recorded.
20
The Voice of Orthodoxy
After the appearance of Mike and Sid the analysis suddenly began to veer into the terrifying pathways of religious conflict. The serpent had caught up with the couch. "I want you to be free," Dr. Wilbur told Sybil in September, 1957. "Free not only of your mother and your ambivalent feelings about your father but also of the religious conflicts and distortions that divide you."
Sybil wanted to be free, but she was terrified that analysis would take her religion away. The terror was greatly intensified, moreover, by the realization that the help that she had always thought would come from God was now coming from Freud. Unready to accept this conclusion even though it was her own, she pondered whether both Freud and the Church could be right at the same time. The pondering in turn heightened the feeling of being simultaneously frantic, anxious, and trapped.
Wanting freedom from the religious distortions that hounded and divided her yet wanting to hold on to her fundamental beliefs, she realized that the problem was one of salvaging God while surrendering the appurtenances with which He had been enshrouded. This meant breaking free from an environmental bondage to a childhood in which religion was omnipresent. Armageddon was table talk, and the end of the world was a threatening reality. There had been menace, too, in grandfather Dorsett's prattle about the seven last plagues and the inevitable war with China and about how in the wake of the Catholics' assumption of power would come the doom of mankind, a doom that had also been prepared, her grandfather averred, by the perfidious, sacrilegious theory of evolution that Darwin had promulgated.
The crypt in the cathedral of Sybil's religious torment was occupied, too, by a variety of symbolic figures from the past, exerting in the present their throttling grip. One of these was no less a personage than Satan-- the serpent who had stalked through Sybil's childhood, a living, breathing presence. Fearing that he would creep in at night, she had also feared that nothing she could do would or could keep him from "getting her."
In the crypt of torment, too, was an angel with sword and fire, who, having driven Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden because they were "bad," threatened to drive Sybil out of her home because she, too, was "bad."
The more, therefore, that the analysis led Sybil to dip into the accretive religious heritage of an overstrict observance of rigid faith, the more hounded, divided she became. Yet while inwardly rebelling, she outwardly conformed to the letter of the orthodoxy.
The voice of that orthodoxy was heard in the consulting room that brisk September day. Sybil was seated on the couch, close to the doctor. The discussion moved from the need for freedom in the present to the lack of freedom imposed by the past.
"I understood the reasons for not smoking, not dancing, not going to birthday parties on Sabbath," Sybil explained. "But I rebelled inside. Then after a while I didn't rebel. Then I did again. And now I'm trying not to."
"Why," the doctor asked in dismay, "are you trying not to now?"
Sybil was silent.
"Okay," the doctor prodded. "Now what makes sense about not going to a birthday party on Sabbath?"
"Because it says in the Bible you should not do your own pleasure on the Sabbath day. You are supposed to think about God. Not do secular things." She had spoken unhesitatingly, but now she added defensively, "I don't want to talk about it."
"Doesn't the Bible say," the doctor reminded her, "on six days work and rest on the seventh? Isn't going to a party part of the seventh day's leisure of which the Bible talks?"
"You could go to a party on another day," Sybil replied nonresponsively. "But not on Sabbath because observance was from sundown to sundown. That's what God told us to do."
The doctor offered a correction: "That's what the prophets in the Bible said God told us to do. Le
t's not confuse the issue."
"God talked through them," Sybil replied with conviction.
"Perhaps," said the doctor.
"The Bible is written by the inspiration of God," Sybil affirmed. "It isn't just something somebody has written down."
"The prophets were human beings and we cannot be absolutely, positively, totally sure they got things exactly correct."
"God," Sybil replied, "would not permit them to make mistakes."
"Oh, He permits people to make mistakes!" There was a tinge of irony in the doctor's voice.
"Yes," Sybil conceded. Then her facial expression became taut as she added, "But not in something as important as His law, the guide for generations to come."
"Is loving your fellow man part of worshiping God?" the doctor asked.
"It's part of it," Sybil replied authoritatively. "Not all of it. God said: "Love thy neighbor as thyself.""
"And if a neighbor should have a birthday on the Sabbath," the doctor argued, "should he be deprived of the celebration of that day?"
"Yes," Sybil insisted, "God said He should come first."
"Aren't we worshiping God when we celebrate our birthday?"
"We are not," said Sybil.
"All right," the doctor persisted, "you celebrate Christmas--Christ's birthday?"
"Not in our Church. It's all right to realize and remember that He was born, but you must keep in mind it wasn't that particular day--December 25."
"Isn't it proper to honor the days on which we were born if we are children of God?"
Sybil replied sternly: "But you don't have to have birthday parties and go around tooting and yelling and that sort of thing on the Sabbath. There are many things you have to forgo if you are going to follow God. It doesn't have to be easy. St. John the Baptist said, "I have fought the good fight.""
There was momentary silence. Then, with a directness calculated to quicken Sybil's own repressed doubts--as expressed by some of the other selves-- Dr. Wilbur said: "Well, there is one thing I really don't comprehend about your religion: one thing for which man has struggled through the centuries is his freedom."
"That may be. But no one wants freedom from God." An unwavering Sybil had had the last word.
A few days later Peggy Lou and Peggy Ann displayed combined anger and terror when Dr. Wilbur began to talk about religion. "It's all mixed up," said Peggy Lou, speaking for both Peggy Ann and herself. "It's futile to talk about it. It goes round and round." Pacing the consulting room, Peggy Lou came to a sudden halt. "It's supposed to do more than not upset you. It's supposed to help you. But it never helped me. It never helped Peggy Ann or any of the rest of us." The fire of rebellion had been unleashed, yet the Church still stood. With a swift sharp movement, however, as Peggy Lou continued to pace the floor, she reached metaphorically for the edifice without exit, serving notice, "I'd like to tear the Church down!"
Vanessa breezed into the consulting room a few days after Peggy Lou's diatribe. Although Vanessa was not quite ready to tear the Church down, she expressed contempt for both the Church's prohibitions and its congregation. "I'm not devout," Vanessa said with an attractive toss of the head, "but even if I were, the people in the Willow Corners Church would have turned me off. They were bigoted, unjust, irrational, and hypocritical. I can't see how they dared to call themselves Christians." Vanessa's lips formed a satiric smile. "All the things you had to do to be right," she jeered. "The irony was that the things you wanted to do weren't wrong. On Sabbath they wanted you just to sit. That, of course, my dear Watson, was a waste of time."
She stopped talking and met the doctor's gaze. "And, Doctor, I must confess that I didn't understand the meaning of God's love. Mother was always trying to tell me that God was love, and I couldn't understand what love was. But I did know I didn't want God to be like my mother."
"I see," the doctor replied.
"Mother said she loved me, but if that was love ..."
"Then you didn't want love ..."
"And I'm supposed to want God ..."
"You were afraid ..."
"Because," Vanessa explained, "I didn't know what God and His love were going to do to me."
"Yes," agreed the doctor. "So you were afraid."
Even before Vanessa left the room, Marcia entered the scene to add a few variations on the theme. Religious yet resentful of the religion's prohibitions, which had created in her a sense of alienation and deprived her of the opportunity to grow up freely, she looked at the doctor pensively.
"Things that were right for everybody else were wrong for me. The worst of it was I knew I couldn't do these things--dancing, going to the movies, wearing jewelry--even when I grew up.
"Would you believe it, Dr. Wilbur, I didn't see my first movie until I came to live in New York?" she confided with a derisive but almost comic shrug.
Marcia smiled wanly. "Looking back," she said, "I realize how trapped I was by all the talk of the end of the world. It was something to look forward to, and there would be a better life after that. I had to believe that. But underneath I wished it weren't that way because there were so many things I wanted to do, and it was as if the end would come before I had a chance. But it seemed wrong to think that way, and I had a mixed up feeling--the same sort of feeling I have now when I realize things can't be different."
Mike and Sid, who also made their way into the era of analytic religious debate, voiced a belief in God but a contempt for religious rituals and histrionics. They were not religious, but they were concerned with religion. What they especially resented was grandfather's prattle about Armageddon and evolution. They--especially Mike--were more interested in doing battle with their grandfather and in defending Sybil as well as themselves against him than in the truth or falsity of his utterances.
Ruthie, who was only a baby and whom Dr. Wilbur had met only in connection with the primal scene, talked of rebellion in the church's sandbox. "Our hands were in the sandbox," Ruthie said. "The sand felt all smooth. We let it run through our fingers. We liked the sand, stood things in the sand. Then we were big enough to hear about that angel we didn't trust at all. We'd get up Sabbath morning and play. We thought they'd forgotten, but then they'd remember. We'd say, "Don't wanna go!
Don't wanna go!" Daddy would look. Mama said we hadda grow up. If Daddy had a white shirt and Mama was fixing pancakes, then we knew there'd be the sandbox. So when we saw the white shirt and the pancakes we got sick, had to go to bed, and Daddy and Mama went to church without us."
Of all the selves of Sybil it was Mary, the homebody, to whom religion meant most. Mary, who had rejected the doctrines, the rituals, the florid symbolism of the faith, had incorporated within herself the unpretentious religion of grandmother Dorsett. "I pray to God," Mary told the doctor, "but I don't go to church. I try to be honest, truthful, and patient and to lead a good Christian life. I believe in "live and let live." This brings me solace."
Yet as the discussions of religion progressed, Dr. Wilbur could see that Mary was losing her serenity. While Sybil was concerned that analysis would deprive her of her religion, Mary was troubled that analysis would make her religion sound inconsistent. And in time the feelings of entrapment that the religion wrought in all the selves, but most especially in the Peggys, reached and overwhelmed Mary. Becoming subdued and depressed, Mary told Dr. Wilbur, "I'm caught in here, inside of these walls. Peggy Lou brought me a picture of the church, and there was no exit. I'm caught in this building with no doors. It seems to be dome-shaped and to be built of blocks of packed snow."
As the analysis proceeded, the religious conflicts surfaced more and more. It would be easy but untrue to say that while Sybil, the waking self, representing the conscious mind, conformed, the others, whose domain was the unconscious, rebelled. The truth was that even though most markedly conformity was apparent in Sybil and rebellion in the Peggys, both conformity and rebellion were expressed in a variety of ways in all the selves, many of whom were further divided within the autonomy o
f their individual identities.
All of the selves had independent religious convinces and attitudes. All, with the exception of the Peggys, believed in God; all felt trapped by the Church. Under the pressure of confrontation with religion in analysis, Mary wanted to die, and the Peggys wanted to run away. Marcia and Vanessa broke away from some of the old restraints and began, in keeping with Dr. Wilbur's urging, to separate God from the Church, the congregation, and the Church's prohibitions. Feeling freer, Vanessa bought a pair of red earrings to match her hair and Marcia went to the movies on Sabbath. Marcia also dared, experimentally at any rate, to light a cigarette and take a sip of sherry.
Vicky, who had played the role of observer without declaring her own convictions--since after all she had only been a visitor in the Dorsett church--became troubled about Marcia and Vanessa.
"No harm in what they've done so far," Vicky told Dr. Wilbur, "but they're showing off their new freedom. By pulling away from the others they are going to make integration more difficult."
"Yes, I know, Vicky," Dr. Wilbur agreed. "But maybe integration will involve bringing the others to where Marcia and Vanessa are."
Vicky shrugged. Then she looked fixedly at the doctor and expressed perturbation at the change in Sybil herself. "Sybil," Vicky informed the doctor, "hasn't known what her relationship to God is ever since she found out about the rest of us. You see, Dr. Wilbur, she always felt that this condition of hers was evil. As a little girl she thought it was a form of punishment, the handiwork of Satan. When you told her about us, that old feeling about evil came back, even though she was no longer so sure about Satan.
"Sybil often wonders," Vicky continued, "whether she has displeased God. She is also unsure of whether her motives are always right. She gets scared about words--all this talk here-- making things better and then having the whole world to face." Vicky leaned her head on her hand thoughtfully. "Sybil's afraid that if she gets better, something terrible will happen. It's as if the serpent is about to get her once again even though the serpent is losing his name."
Sybil Page 27