Some of the kittens were weaker than others, as were some of the selves. "Some, such as Vicky, Peggy, Marcia, Vanessa, Mary, Mike, and Sid," Dr. Wilbur had said, "are active; others like Sybil Ann are passive. All of them are strong or weak depending upon what emotion at the time there is to defend." Dr. Wilbur, of course, was the unnamed figure in the dream who would know how to make everything all right.
The act of saving the kittens seemed to Sybil not an act of personal solicitude on her part but, like the train, the analogue of the analysis that was attempting to save both her and all of the "kittens" in her still mysterious "family."
Sybil rose from the bed, started to dress, and tried to extricate herself from the realization that having to get rid of their (her) dead mother before she could take the kittens safely home meant only one thing--that only by ridding herself of her mother could she become well, strong, really a "family." Family was the euphemism Sybil used for becoming one.
As Sybil walked into the kitchen for breakfast, she pushed the dream aside, unaware that her explication had overlooked the fact that the "new work" that blocked the train's passage--the free flow of life--which she had interpreted as "analysis," had in the dream been built by her father. The starving kittens could be interpreted as representing sexual starvation. The same events that had driven Sybil from a normal childhood had driven her, too, from a normal womanhood.
Most importantly, what Sybil didn't notice about the dream were her own emotions in disposing of the mother cat. With businesslike precision but without repugnance she had flung her mother into the river and had become disturbed only when there was danger that her mother would float back to shore.
Later that morning, during the hour with Dr. Wilbur, Sybil talked of the selves the kittens in the dream symbolized.
"I went to all the trouble of coming to New York," Sybil remarked resentfully, "and they have taken over the analysis. They've made friends with you, go on trips, make friends with people I'd like to know. And I'm left out."
Overriding Dr. Wilbur's explanations, Sybil refused to let the doctor come to the defense of the personalities, particularly of Vicky. When the doctor pointed out that by resenting her other selves, Sybil was avoiding the issue and that such avoidance in psychoanalytical terms was known as resistance, Sybil began to make a joke of it. "I know I'm indulging in that nasty word," Sybil kept saying. "Don't say it. But that Vicky you're so fond of is a blabbermouth. I can't have any secrets. She rushes to tell you everything. If she doesn't, one of those other midwesterners does. They give me no peace, no privacy, no freedom."
"Vicky is trying to help you," the doctor protested.
Sybil summoned enough nerve to reply, "I'd be better off without her help." Then Sybil added what she had said many times before: "I can't afford that Peggy Lou."
Then, taking stock of her current financial situation, Sybil explained, "I came to New York with five thousand dollars in savings. Three thousand have been spent on paying for the analysis and buying a few extras I hadn't been able to manage on what Dad sent me. But two thousand of the five thousand have been blown on Peggy Lou's broken glass."
The resentment Sybil bore toward Peggy Lou for the broken glass was deepened by other evidences of Peggy Lou's destructiveness. "The other night," Sybil went on, "I found that my charcoal sketches had been destroyed. Teddy said that Peggy Lou had done it. What's the matter with Peggy Lou? You said she worked in black and white. Doesn't she like black and white anymore? Or is it me she doesn't like? If so, the feeling is mutual."
After she left the office, Sybil went to school. As she was leaving the chemistry lab, Henry, who sat next to her and whom she also knew from other classes, followed her to the elevator.
There was an affinity between them. Both were from the Midwest; both loved music and books; both were premed students (now that she had her Master's degree in art, Sybil had decided on a future that included both art and child psychiatry). Although Henry was eight years younger than Sybil, she was so youthful in appearance that she actually looked younger than he.
Henry walked Sybil home. When they reached the old brownstone, they stood talking. Reluctant to leave her, he offered to let her read his notes covering the classes she had missed while she was in Philadelphia. "I'll go over the stuff with you," he volunteered. She invited him in.
They worked, student to student, with no surface insinuations of sex. He would have liked to have had a beer, but he settled for iced tea, which she presented to him with the cookies Teddy had said that Mary had baked. Sybil enjoyed a pleasant two hours of wholeness.
As Henry was leaving and they were standing at the half-open door, the mood changed. No longer only a colleague, Henry put his hand gently on Sybil's shoulder and looked at her tenderly. "I want you to give me a date for the dance Wednesday night," he said softly.
Sybil panicked. Replying no, she shrank from Henry's touch.
"Don't you like me just a little bit?" he asked. "Of course, I like you," she replied slowly.
"Well?" he asked.
"But I don't want to date anybody," she replied firmly.
"You're too nice for that," he protested. "Lots of people like you, and you shouldn't be like that. You're good company. It would be fun to go with you."
Sybil shook her head decisively. "No," she repeated. "No."
"Then how about dinner?" he asked. "No," she replied. "Henry, please don't press me. We'll see each other in the lab. I value your friendship, but don't press."
"But why? I don't get it," he persevered. There was an awkward pause. Then he asked: "What is it?"
In the silence that followed Sybil could feel internal pressures, the interference of the others, as she had come to call it. The pressure was there, although the meaning was obscure. Sybil did not know that Vicky was thinking, "He's nice. I can't see why she doesn't date him," or that Peggy Lou was fuming, "Just like her. She never does anything I enjoy doing."
"Sybil," Henry said as he tried to take her in his arms, "I like you. I've liked you for a long time. Why can't we see each other?"
Extricating herself from the embrace, Sybil reached for the door knob, hinting that she wanted Henry to go. "Are you sure?" he said.
"Very sure," she replied.
There were footsteps in the hall. Henry turned to see who it was, and as he did so, Sybil shut the door behind him and bolted the lock. The feeling she experienced as she did so was reminiscent of the moment in her dream in which, after placing the kittens on the blanket, she had closed the box. In the dream she had created an improvised perforation to leave room for air, but now the "box" that she had remorselessly shut tight was airless.
Here she was, on the other side of the door that she herself had closed, thirty-five years old and an old maid--excluded by the phalanx of the married, a third plate at their dinner tables. Isolated, with only Teddy near, she felt removed from the world. And Teddy's awareness of the strange circumstances of their joint domesticity was deeply disquieting.
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 Peggys, Mike and Sid, Marcia and Vanessa, Mary, Sybil Ann and the other personalities. This knowledge deepened Sybil's uneasiness and gave loneliness a terrifyingly new dimension. What did these others tell Teddy? Privacy was impossible as long as unknown voices proclaimed secrets in the apartment.
Henry. Male companionship. Perhaps the father of the baby Sybil so urgently wanted but probably couldn't have. Whenever a man had entered her life, she had wanted his children even more than she had wanted him. And the desire for Henry, although deeply buried, had been there.
The dance? She couldn't have gone to the dance. Her religion didn't permit it. She couldn't have gone even if there were no religion to stand in her way.
Why not dinner? One thing would lead to another. If she allowed herself to become i
nvolved with Henry, he would come to know her well and learn all about her. Then he would reject her. She knew that she had to protect herself against such an eventuality. No man must come close until she was well. Well? She winced. Would she ever be well?
The mantel clock was striking eight. Teddy wouldn't be home for two hours. Sybil went out. As she walked, the buildings of the city seemed to stretch endlessly to the east. She kept on walking west.
Life had stopped while she had reversed her route. She still had a whole world to forge. So far the analysis was taking her backward, not forward. The ambition to become a doctor had been consistently frustrated by her blackouts in science classes, and the ambition was constantly receding. She couldn't bear to try and fail.
She could scarcely even endure just being awake. Waking, she knew one of the others might take over. Even when there wasn't an actual takeover, there was the everlasting internal pressure, the interference by the others. She felt alone, useless, futile. Convinced that she was never going to get better, Sybil was faced with self-recriminations and complaints.
Certain that her life had stopped while she retraced a path that uncovered only anguish, Sybil felt that she had indeed come to the end of the line. She didn't want to live this way.
She reached the Hudson River, brownish-green and deep. She envisioned herself in the water, sinking. Death would bring surcease.
Sybil walked closer to the river, but before she could actually reach it, her body turned, propelled by another's will. The body, controlled by Vicky, sought and found a phone booth in one of the apartment houses on Riverside Drive. After dialing, Vicky said in a firm, clear voice, "Dr. Wilbur, Sybil was going to throw herself in the Hudson River, but I didn't let her."
Part IV
Reentry
25
Beginning to Remember
At first Sybil had doubted that any mere medicine could produce any decisive changes, but when the few electric shock treatments for which she had asked to make her feel safer after her suicide attempt had effected no discernible difference in her feelings, she had agreed to sodium pentothal because she trusted Dr. Wilbur.
The doctor herself had suggested pentothal reluctantly because she believed that straight psychoanalysis was the treatment of choice in Sybil's case. But the intimations of suicide, the actual near-attempt, made it necessary to resolve, to some degree and over a short period of time, the intense anxiety and depression. From long experience Dr. Wilbur knew that abreaction--the emotional release or discharge resulting from recalling to awareness a painful experience that has been repressed because it was consciously intolerable--with pentothal was a markedly useful tool. By discharging and desensitizing painful emotions, pentothal often led to increased insights.
The first pentothal treatment, administered by vein, appreciably diminished Sybil's anxiety.
In the sessions that followed, for fifty-six, sometimes seventy hours after receiving pentothal, Sybil came to know a sense of freedom that never before had been hers. Pentothal, a barbiturate that is both an anesthetic and a hypnotic, had conferred the sensation of feeling perfectly well-- an experience Sybil had never had before. On the day after the treatment, there was always euphoria, which was due not only to the anti-anxiety effect of the barbiturate but also to the abreaction of severe trauma. Pentothal brought to the surface the deeply buried, debilitating hatred of her mother. Although Sybil could not yet accept this hatred, the fact that it was no longer buried paved the way to a later acceptance.
The freedom Sybil knew through pentothal the other selves also experienced. Now as never before the others had the opportunity both to be and to talk. Vicky had all the memories, her own and those of the other selves, including Sybil's. The other fourteen personalities had their own memories and some of the recollections of the other alternating selves and of Sybil.
Only Sybil possessed none of the memories of the others. But as pentothal unleashed some forgotten fragments of the past, the memories relating to the experiences of the others and the memories of events that Sybil had lived through as herself but had forgotten began to filter into awareness.
Memory didn't just happen. After the pentothal treatment Dr. Wilbur would confront Sybil with the deeply buried memories that returned during the pentothal "sleep" and vanished upon waking.
"Oh, I had forgotten all about that," Sybil would remark when, upon awakening, she was presented with the memory. Then after remembering the event for a time, she would lose it again. The doctor would then try again, until, very gradually, what had been remembered under pentothal began also to be remembered during normal living.
Aware of the new order, Sybil had the feeling of expansive sidewalks, wherever she stood, reaching beyond the painful present and the even more terrifying past. The sidewalks pointed toward the promised land of either being freed of the others or becoming one with them. Neither Sybil nor Dr. Wilbur knew which of the two forms getting well would take.
For the first time Sybil also began to experience the emotions attributable to each of the other selves.
Beginning to understand, too, what triggered dissociation, the patient now knew not only intellectually but emotionally that "When I'm angry, I can't be." Anger, of course, was Peggy Lou's province.
The impression Sybil herself had was that subsiding slowly was the gnawing conflict that had driven her to the Hudson River--and also away from it. More concerned now with "Who am I?" she informed the doctor, "Pentothal makes me feel that I am me." Yet although the conflict had ebbed, it had not disappeared. For the present the barbiturate bestowed a sense of release, and concurrently, the feelings of unreality that had been hers almost since time began for her were gradually replaced by a feeling of solidity. Always far away from her feelings, she was coming closer to them now.
Sailing along with the speed of a schooner in a gale, Sybil came to regard the weekly pentothal sessions as propitious winds. That Dr. Wilbur visited Sybil in her apartment when pentothal was administered brought additional comfort. Feeling more alive, more interested, Sybil redecorated the apartment, made it more attractive for her doctor-guest. The jab in the vein, the occasional inability to find a new vein after months had passed and so many veins had been pressed into service, the not-infrequent swelling of the injected part of the anatomy, the feeling of chill that sometimes ran through the patient, the hiccups ("I sound as if I'm drunk," Vicky said. "And here I am getting treatment when I'm not sick")--all of this physical discomfiture was there. None of it mattered, however, in the light of the bright new day sodium pentothal had brought. On sodium pentothal Sybil had even gained fifteen pounds.
Nirvana? No. The euphoria was often deflated, sometimes destroyed by the reawakened memories of childhood horrors that Sybil had so painstakingly buried.
"Your mother trapped you, and it's almost as if you have taken over trapping yourself," Dr. Wilbur would say. "But you're getting rid of your mother." Sybil had already done so in her dream about the mother cat, but she was horrified by the unnatural desire.
"I'm helping you to grow up," the doctor would continue. "You're getting better, and you're going to be able to use all your talents." The incantation, the exorcising of Hattie Dorsett, would proceed: "Your mother taught you not to believe in yourself. I'm going to help you do so. The numbers will come back. The music will come back. There will be an end to the painting blocks. You will do many things well."
"I'm so cold, so cold," Sybil would reply through chattering teeth.
Integration? Far from it. As the past flooded back, there was all the more reason to regress into the other selves, defenses against the past. Yet in the valley of dissociation there were also the first glimmers of coalescence.
There was a glimmer on a Friday night in the very height of spring. Seated on her bed after having awakened from a tranquil three-hour sleep following a sodium pentothal treatment, Sybil was thinking about the previous day, much of which had been blank. Suddenly action was etched into the blankness.
Perhaps the most extraordinary aspect of the recollection was that 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.
Sybil could see herself becoming Sybil Ann. As Sybil Ann she had returned to the apartment and had been suddenly obsessed with the desire to go off on a trip. Somehow this trip had not eventuated, but while planning to go, she had looked at a purse on the dresser with Sybil Ann's eyes, thinking that she would take the purse with her and return it as soon as she got settled somewhere. Observing that the name on the identification card was Sybil I. Dorsett, Sybil in the person of Sybil Ann thought: that must be the owner. The memory of being Sybil Ann was so distinct that it had even included Sybil Ann's confusion as to who Sybil was.
This glimpse into the present was followed some weeks later by an even more confoundingly swift perception of the past.
At breakfast Teddy was saying, "I'd certainly like to know what Peggy Lou was talking about when she said that letters make words, words make sentences, and sentences make paragraphs."
"You're asking me what Peggy Lou meant?" Sybil replied. "Me? I'm the last one to ask. You know how Peggy Lou and I feel about each other."
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