"Are you a little less scared?" the doctor continued.
"I think so."
"Do you think you can do what you want to do today?"
"I'll try to make buttonholes this afternoon," Sybil replied.
"It's going to be a good day for all of you," Dr. Wilbur predicted.
"I'm really just me," Sybil insisted. "All of you are just you," the doctor replied prophetically.
The prophecy, however, was without any optimism as to when the integration would take place. What had happened in this session was spontaneous, spectacular, but the doctor could not be certain of the true significance. Peggy Lou had obviously joined sleeping Sybil, Vicky, and Ruthie, not through the assistance of hypnosis, but spontaneously. The doctor had not said, "Peggy Lou, I want you to meet Sybil." It was Peggy Lou herself who said, "I am Sybil and Vicky, too." Since the spontaneous merger had occurred in the hypnotic state, the joining was with sleeping Sybil, not waking Sybil. The doctor believed that the wisest course of action was to wait and see what would happen to this spontaneous integration.
Meantime, between July, 1960, and early January, 1962, analysis proceeded, traumas were resolved, and the massive residue from the past began to chip away. The two and a half years, however, were a period of watchful waiting for the major breakthrough that would make Sybil one person.
30
Hate Heals
On a day in early January, 1962, as Sybil and Dr. Wilbur were driving along the West Side Highway on one of their now frequent out-of-the-office visits, Sybil was listless, gloomy. Usually she enjoyed the nonprofessional moments with the doctor, but on this overcast day depression shrouded enthusiasm.
"You're down," the doctor ventured, "because you're angry and you've turned your anger against yourself. It's probably your mother."
"That doesn't make me feel any better," Sybil replied defensively. Turning to the window, she made clear that the matter was closed.
Dr. Wilbur's hands were on the steering wheel; her eyes were focused on the traffic ahead, but her thoughts were on the impenetrable void that still clearly separated the conscious from the unconscious Sybil. Virtually all of the other selves, representing the unconscious, had vigorously declared their hatred of Hattie Dorsett, a hatred Sybil also had expressed in the dream about the mother cat. Neither the reactions of the other selves nor the behavior in the dream, however, had filtered into Sybil's conscious awareness.
Now, when the chasm between inner truth and outer awareness had become apparent, was the very moment, Dr. Wilbur decided, for a direct onslaught on this stranglehold suppressing Sybil's freedom to be one.
"Sybil," the doctor called, placing her hand on Sybil's shoulder.
"Yes?" Sybil replied hesitantly. "Would you mind," the doctor asked, "if I hypnotize you to get at the source of your depression?"
"Here?" Sybil looked at the doctor incredulously.
"Here," was the decisive reply. Against the background of honking horns and chugging cars, there then came the hypnotic chant. As consciousness faded and Sybil drifted off into sleep, she dug her fingernails into the car's upholstery and murmured, "When somebody is your mother, you're supposed to love her, honor her."
"Not when she doesn't earn your love or give you reason to honor her," said the doctor.
"I wanted to please her because she was my mother," Sybil pleaded in a low, strained voice. "But I never could. She said I was funny. I feel choked up, like crying, when I think of her. She tied me down. It hurt terribly. She was always doing things--hideous things." Sybil's voice quavered; her body shook.
"Sybil?" the doctor asked quietly.
"I got all mixed up," was the reply. "I never did understand. Put it way inside. A black strip with a round hole in it. I see it now."
Silence. A low moan of suffering. Dr. Wilbur held her breath. She knew that Sybil, like a surgeon pointing a knife at the crucial lesion, was poised on the threshold of traumatic revelation. Sybil's voice rose. "I told myself I loved mother and only pretended that I hated her. But it was no pretense." Sybil's voice broke. The crisis had passed. Sybil went on: "I really hated her--ever since I can remember."
Overpowering feelings of hatred flooded Sybil. "I hate her," she gasped. "Whenever she hurt me, I saw myself put my hands around her throat. Other ways, too. Stab her. Lots of times I wanted to stab her. Figures of her filled with nails. Never did it at home. Sometimes at school, sometimes at the hardware store. But I wanted to do it. I wanted to. When she died, I thought for a moment I had killed her. I wanted to for so long. I wanted to kill my mother."
At this point Dr. Wilbur could see that the paroxysm of hatred, drained from the unconscious, was invading the conscious. The internal motion catapulted Sybil forward. Dr. Wilbur caught her before she could hit the dashboard, but the doctor could not--and would not even if she could-- restrain the torrent of hatred. A crescendo of short, swift stabs: "I hate her. I hate that bitch. I want to kill my mother. Even if she is my mother. I want her dead! I hate her, do you hear? I HATE HER!"
Sybil's fists pummeled the dashboard. Turning inward, Sybil had reclaimed the anger she had denied since the time in St. Mary's hospital, when the original Sybil had ceased to be.
There was silence in the car, but from outside came the honking of horns, the sound of an auto careening because of a flat tire. Largely oblivious of outer things, Dr. Wilbur knew that the taproot of trauma that had triggered the original proliferation into multiple selves had been demolished. The doctor decided to wake Sybil up.
"I guess I didn't think much of my mother," was Sybil's first remark. Amazed that the patient had remembered, Dr. Wilbur countered: "On the contrary--you thought a great deal of her. And you wanted desperately to have her love you."
Smiling wryly, Sybil replied, "Wanting to kill your mother isn't very loving."
Even more startled than before at how much of what had been spoken under hypnosis had been remembered, the doctor knew that a milestone in the analysis had been reached. Not only had Sybil remembered what she had said under hypnosis, but she also had recalled and accepted as hers Mike's "killing" in effigy of Hattie Dorsett. These two developments, supplementing the fundamental admission of hatred of Hattie, so crucial to recovery, had represented vital moves toward integration.
Now, for the first time since she was three and a half years old, Sybil could get angry. The need for the selves who dealt with anger had therefore diminished, and those selves were now partially integrated with Sybil. Now, too, that Marcia's death wish for mother had become Sybil's wish, it was possible for Marcia and Sybil to move closer. But most remarkable of all was that once the capacity to get angry had been restored to Sybil, the pathways had been cleared for other emotions. The very act of expressing rage against Hattie Dorsett had transformed Sybil into a woman no longer bereft of emotions. Sybil had begun to move away from depletion, toward wholeness.
Hattie Dorsett, who had not really died until Sybil killed her with hatred on the West Side Highway, was no longer the major obstacle to Sybil's return to health.
The liberation of Sybil was almost immediate. It revealed itself dramatically several weeks later during a visit to her father in Detroit. She was seated on the sofa in the sunroom when Willard joined her. At first, simply reminiscent, she half expected him to take refuge behind Architectural Forum. When, instead, he seated himself beside her, eager to talk, apparently receptive to what she would say, for the first time she had no inhibitions about talking to him.
"When I was six and you had neuritis," she heard herself saying in a gush of powerful recollections soon after the conversation had begun, "you let me be close to you for the first time." There was an involuntary twitching in Willard's face as he replied softly, "I didn't realize that this was so."
"When we went to the farm that winter," she continued unrelentingly, "our closeness was intensified. But when we left the farm and you returned to work and I began school, we became strangers again." Flustered, defensive, Willard Dorsett re
plied "I gave you everything. A good home, good clothes, toys. Guitar lessons. I did these things because I cared."
"Dad." Sybil paused to weigh her words; then, swept along by the assertiveness that had so recently been returned to her, she took the plunge. "You gave me a guitar when I wanted a violin," Sybil said. "Don't you realize now that you were working in a vacuum? That you never bothered to communicate with me?"
Willard drew himself up with a sharp, abrupt movement. "I did sense," he said, "that the guitar lessons made you nervous, but I certainly didn't know why." He paused reflectively. "I see a lot of things differently now. I always wanted to do the right thing for you, but I didn't know how."
Very much aware of his proximity and stunned that he had not tried to make her feel guilty because she had been direct with him for the first time in her life, Sybil decided to give voice to what had been buried deepest.
"Dad," she said, "there are things that happened to me when I was very little ..." Willard Dorsett shut his eyes to stop the stream of his daughter's recollections, now flowing perilously close to the guilt that five years earlier in Dr. Wilbur's office he had accepted as his own. "Dad, are you all right?" Sybil asked anxiously.
Opening his eyes, he held up his hand in a gesture of entreaty, saying: "Sybil, say no more. I'm an old man now. Spare me because of my years if for no other reason."
"When I was very little, Dad," Sybil persisted despite the entreaty, "hideous things happened. You didn't stop them."
"The wheat crib. The buttonhook," Willard murmured. Then he looked directly at his daughter, imploring, "Forgive me."
This time it was Sybil who rose to her feet, pacing. Forgive the lost time, the lost years? The anger that so newly seethed in her precluded forgiveness. "Let the dead past remain buried," was as close as she came to conciliation. She was ready to forget, not in the old sense of retreating from what she couldn't face but in the altogether new way of not making an issue of what had been done long ago.
The moment passed, and her outer mood shifted. Willard and Sybil began to talk of less painful things and the pleasures in store for her during the visit. But before Frieda called to say that lunch was being served, Willard Dorsett for the very first time talked to his daughter about her blackouts. "If I gave you more money," he asked, "would the blackouts end?"
"Money always helps," Sybil said simply, "but after thirty-six years of having blackouts, more money is not directly the answer." Then she added, "But they are becoming less frequent. I'm getting better."
"While we're talking about money, Sybil," Willard went on, "I want you to know that if anything happens to me, you'll be taken care of. The new duplex I'm building will belong to you."
"Thanks, Dad," Sybil said, half daring to trust in the caring he had at long last expressed.
At this point Willard made a curious remark: "Tell me, Sybil, who are these people you talk to and think you know?" Startled, she scrutinized the man who for so many years had lived under the same roof with the Peggys, Vicky, Marcia, Vanessa, Mary, and the others.
"Dad," Sybil said, "you misunderstood what Dr. Wilbur told you about these other people. I don't talk to them or think I know them. I was unaware of their existence until Dr. Wilbur told me about them. I'm only now getting to know them, beginning to talk to them."
This declaration was too much for Willard to absorb. Groping for meaning, he managed to say, "There is so much about you, Sybil, I can't understand." Still profoundly perplexed he led her into the dining room for the lunch Frieda had prepared.
That night, in the guest room of her father's house, Sybil dreamed about the sunroom of the Dorsett home in Willow Corners.
Hattie was dead, and Sybil had come expressly to visit her father. The only bed in the house--the familiar large white iron bed in which her parents had slept--was now placed in the sunroom. Since Sybil had to sleep somewhere and this was the only bed in the house, she was asleep on one side of it. Her father slept on the other side. Awaking suddenly, she saw a man's face at the window. The lips moved. To someone unseen the stranger was saying, "They are mating."
"Don't move your eyes, Dad," Sybil called aloud, waking him. "There's a man watching through the window. He thinks we're sleeping together." Then, observing that the accuser at the window had a camera, she covered her eyes with her arm to avoid being recognized in the photograph. "Dad," she pleaded, "please get me a glass of hot milk so I can sleep better." As her father silently complied, she studied the accuser's face so as to make an accurate sketch of him for the police. She was disturbed because the accuser at the window had blonde hair.
Carefully reaching her arms through the bars at the head of the bed, she felt for the phone on the floor.
"Operator," she said, "get me the police." She heard a voice answer, "They're gone for the night."
"Then please try the constable," Sybil persisted. "Gone for the night," the voice iterated in sepulchral tones. "But I have to have help," Sybil cried. "There's a man at my window."
"Does your father carry any insurance?" the voice queried.
"What has that got to do with it?" Sybil shouted.
"I'll call the insurance broker, madam," the voice replied obligingly. "If you have the number ..."
Sybil suddenly found herself clutching a handful of small business cards of insurance companies. As she groped for a name, she found the print too small to read. "Number, please; number, please," hammered at her brain. "I can't read the numbers," she protested helplessly. "The cards keep slipping." Her hands tried vainly to control the cards, which, of their own momentum, kept shuffling themselves.
"Drop this call, please," the operator's voice finally said.
"Please," Sybil pleaded, "someone must help."
The shattering silence that followed told her the truth, a truth she had never before been able to face ---that nobody was going to avenge the accuser at the window or indeed ever come to her rescue in anything.
Three months later, a letter from Frieda Dorsett, dated April 12, 1962, arrived in Dr. Wilbur's office. It read:
My husband's doctor called me this noon and told me that Sybil's father would not last much longer. As I wrote before, Mr. Dorsett is suffering from terminal cancer.
The doctor suggested that I write you and let you know that he will be glad to talk to you and tell you the situation if you will call him. Enclosed is his card.
Neither Sybil nor her father has mentioned whether she is planning on coming home to see him. I have not suggested anything about it because I do not know whether she can get along without you. It seems they do not realize the seriousness of his illness. Mr. Dorsett keeps saying he will be better in a day or two. The doctors have given him enough medication to take away his pain, but it has also taken away his mind. He has not asked about Sybil's letters in over a week now, and they were always of great importance to him. The last time I tried to read one to him, he stopped me.
I will be glad to have Sybil come home if I can take care of her, but frankly that has worried me for a long time. You know I have to work and cannot stay with her during the daytime.
I will be glad to hear from you if you have anything to suggest.
Two weeks later Dr. Wilbur informed Sybil of Willard's death. Sybil took the news quietly, but Mary, who had loved her father unreservedly, did not. Sybil didn't want to go to the funeral, and it was Sybil's decision that prevailed. The night of the funeral, however, Sybil dreamed that she was at a party at which Dr. Wilbur told her that her father was dead. "He is not. He is not," Sybil heard her own protest. Then rushing to the sunroom, she found him alive and in bed, with people standing around him. She threw herself on the bed beside him, still protesting, "He is not dead.
He is not dead."
But Willard was indeed dead for Sybil in a more devastating way than she could have remotely suspected. News from Frieda that Willard had left his daughter penniless confronted Sybil with the terrible truth, for which her dreams had already prepared her. "You see, S
ybil," Dr. Wilbur said consolingly, "you have always had strong Oedipal feelings for your father, but you've also always hated him. The original Sybil hated both her mother and her father."
The hatred was buttressed by the irony of her father's words, which now returned to mock her: "If anything happens to me, you'll be taken care of."
Taken care of? With her allowance from her father now ended and no inheritance, Sybil found herself barely getting by. Fortunately, she already had her masters degree in art and had dropped out of the premedical program that had wed her to chemistry. There were therefore no tuition fees. The analysis, however, had to go unpd--Dr. Wilbur's investment in the future of achieving the integration of Sybil. As far as Sybil was concerned, however, this was a loan that would be paid. For rent, food, clothes, and other necessities Sybil was dependent upon gifts from friends. These gifts she also regarded as loans. In addition, there were her own slim earnings from intermittent tutoring and sales of paintings (she no longer worked at the Westchester hospital). And there was the temporary job in the laundromat to which Vanessa had led her.
Meanwhile, the analysis, propelled by the momentum of the anger Sybil could now feel, made measurable strides. Vicky was effectively bringing the various selves together by telling them about the past and the present of the total Sybil Dorsett. "The gang," Vicky told Dr. Wilbur, "is getting chummy."
No longer were there two Peggys but a return to Peggy Louisiana. The consolidated Peggy, moreover, was accepting with humor the prospect of becoming one with Sybil. On a morning in May, 1962, wearing a trench coat and peering through the corners of her eyes, Peggy strode into the doctor's office, looked under desks and chairs, and finally announced in pontifical tones: "We must get to the bottom of these traumas. It takes good detective work, Dr. Wilbur-- I mean Dr. Watson."
"Well, Mr. Holmes," Dr. Wilbur asked. "What shall we uncover today?"
Peggy replied: "The pieces, Dr. Watson, all the pieces that will solve this unusual case."
Sybil Page 38