Sybil

by Flora Rheta Schreiber

  32

  One

  "Dead vines, old vines, barbs or briars," Marcia said under hypnosis in January, 1965. "I'm afraid of life and the world--afraid of going out into it. Afraid of being rejected, turned down, cast aside." It was a natural fear of reentry.

  "I'm looking forward to being a well person among well people," Vanessa declared. "Life is for living, and I've waited too long."

  "I think," Mike admitted during the same session, "Sybil's worth more than she thinks she is or Sid and I ever thought she was. People care about her--Flora, Flora's mother, and, of course, the lady doctor and Ramon."

  "Maybe," Sid added, "Sybil can do the things Mike and I want to do but haven't been allowed to do. Maybe it's all right for a woman to build a partition. Maybe she can be the kind of woman she wants to be and do well in a career. With Mike's skill and my skill, with our enthusiasm, I'm sure she can.

  What she wants to do is all right with Mike and me. We like the new Sybil."

  The new Sybil? Who am I? she asked herself. Who is she? Dr. Wilbur likewise asked. For although Sybil was not yet a whole person, she was no longer a mere waking self.

  The only person to appear for the Dorsett appointment these days was this new Sybil. When Dr. Wilbur wanted to communicate with the other selves, she could do so only through hypnosis.

  Shortly after Mary had come out of the igloo, Mary and Sybil Ann had been consolidated. Vanessa, always closer to Sybil than most of the other selves, had moved further in the same direction. Vanessa's passionate denunciation of hypocrisy had now in fact sharpened Sybil's awareness of it, both in the past and the present, thus providing the waking self with new insights. Marcia, who previously had voiced a patient's typical fear of getting well, had gotten well by joining Sybil. The joining had taken place after Marcia, too, had accepted the death wish for mother.

  Peggy did not appear even when summoned. Peggy Lou and Peggy Ann had already been consolidated as Peggy; now the consolidation had gone even further. These keepers of the unintegrated past with its angry and fearful memories had returned to Sybil. After doing the portrait that Ramon had admired--the very last work to come from her--Peggy had ceased to exist as a separate entity. But her assertiveness was very much in the forefront of the new Sybil.

  The newly emerging Sybil, however, was very different from what Dr. Wilbur had originally expected. Since Vicky had all the memories and possessed more of the original Sybil than waking Sybil, the doctor had thought it might be a good idea to do away with all the selves, including waking Sybil, and allow Vicky to be the one self. Yet the doctor had discovered that Vicky, like all the selves, existed for the express purpose of masking the feelings that the waking or central self could not bear to face.

  The answer, therefore, had been to preserve the waking self as such while returning to it all the memories, emotions, knowledge, and modes of behavior of the other selves, thereby restoring the native capacities of the original child. It also meant returning to the waking self the experiences of the one-third of Sybil's life that the other selves alone had lived. This was pioneer work for Dr. Wilbur.

  The doctor knew that all the selves had come close to Sybil. As Sybil changed, the other selves changed as well. There had previously been two levels of denial of Sybil's mother. Sybil had accepted Hattie Dorsett as her mother but had denied the hatred. The other selves had denied that the woman whom they hated was their mother. After Sybil, in that moment of purging in the car, had accepted the hatred, the other selves had come to accept Hattie and now acknowledged her as "our mother." Even Vicky, whose parents had never come from France to reclaim her, finally had come to admit, "Sybil's mother is also mine."

  Sybil had begun to assume the behavior of the others. For example, what had been the exclusive preserve of Peggy Lou had become Sybil's capacity to draw black and white.

  In fact, an overlapping of painting styles had developed among all the selves. On the other hand, although Peggy had returned to Sybil the multiplication that had been learned in Miss Henderson's fifth-grade class, Sybil was still not proficient in its use. In May and June, 1965, the use of hypnosis had tapered off even more, now almost solely confined to communicating with the selves, who could not otherwise be reached. The days of Sybil's dissociation and the spontaneous appearance of the secondary selves seemed over.

  Sybil was in her apartment, writing resumes for a teachers' agency with which she had registered in hope of getting a job outside New York. She now felt able to manage without Dr. Wilbur and was eager to prove her independence. As Sybil was typing, her fingers suddenly went numb. Frightened, she called Dr. Wilbur, but without success. She called Flora. By the time Flora came on the line, Sybil felt numb all over. "I'm sick," she cried into the telephone. "If anything happens to me, sell the stamp album--see that Dr. Wilbur is reimbursed for the analysis." Sybil tried to say more, but the receiver dropped out of her hand. Her arms and legs moved involuntarily. Pitching forward, she hit the wall, crashed across the room, and even hit the ceiling. Then she fell into an inert heap on the floor.

  It was there that Flora found her, black and blue, a terrifying sight. Finally able to speak, Sybil said triumphantly, "I watched all of it. I was aware of what was happening every minute of the time."

  Rising to her feet, Sybil seemed taller than her normal self. A voice younger than Sybil's, light, lilting, and cheerful, exclaimed, "I'm the girl Sybil would like to be. My hair is blonde and my heart is light."

  Then she was gone, and Sybil was there. "I must have blacked out," Sybil said. "Still? How can it be?"

  Flora knew at once that the blonde self who had instantaneously emerged was not any one of the fifteen selves she had previously met. A new self at this stage of the analysis, when Sybil was nearly integrated? The immediate matter at hand, of course, was to get Sybil into bed, to apply cold compresses to the injuries, and to reach Dr. Wilbur. And then?

  "It was a major gastrointestinal upset," Dr. Wilbur told Flora later that evening, "accompanied by a waking seizure and spasticity. All through it Sybil was aware of what was happening."

  Then Flora told Dr. Wilbur about the blonde. "The dissociation was brief, perhaps no more than a minute," Flora said.

  "Last February," Dr. Wilbur replied thoughtfully, "I met this blonde in the office, although I didn't realize it at the time. Sybil had been talking; then she looked blank for a minute, as she did in the old days. Then I heard the voice you described. It was only a minute, a mere flash."

  The next day in the office Dr. Wilbur hypnotized Sybil. Mary Ann was the first to emerge. "We had a fit," she explained. "There's lots to have fits about. The people in the old church in Willow Corners--the barren, ugly church. We hate those people."

  Vicky said, "In our room last night there was someone else."

  "Blonde hair--that one, I saw her," Marcia added. "I don't know her name."

  "Who does?" Vanessa asked.

  "I suppose Vicky does," Marcia replied, "because I think Vicky knows her. Who is she?"

  "A new girl but not new," Vicky replied.

  Suddenly the newcomer spoke--stiltedly, strangely, with the cadences of a rehearsed speech. "I'm not really new," she said. "I've been around for nineteen years. I'm the girl Sybil would like to be. Born in tranquility, I've lived unseen. An adolescent while the others still remained essentially children, I've carried no childhood traumas. I never knew either Hattie or Willard Dorsett, never lived in Willow Corners, never attended the Willow Corners church. I came in Omaha. I enjoyed college, and I love New York.

  I would have joined sororities, would have had many dates, would have been a cheerleader at sports events, a campus leader in everything.

  I love life and living. The only thing that has stood in my way is that I wasn't free to be myself, to walk in the sun and face the world. But now that the others are about to face it, I shall go with them. Now that the others have shed their traumas, I will hold hands with the rest. My vitality will lend strength; my zest for liv
ing, buoyancy; my unscathed past, assurance. I, who have never been ill, will walk with Sybil in the unprotected world of well people."

  "Welcome," said Vicky.

  "You and I belong together, Victoria," the blonde, who still had given no name, replied. "Unlike the others, we were not cradled in traumas but in Sybil's wish. You and I are blonde--the only two of all sixteen of us who are. I understand there were a lot of blondes in Sybil's mother's family and that her mother glorified that hair color. We are blonde because Sybil wished to be blonde."

  The blonde was a dream girl--the girl who had stood with Sybil at the mirror, throbbing with adolescent expectations, as they had waited for Ramon. And if her speech sounded unnatural, it was the affectation of a teenager, spouting her newly found knowledge and confidence.

  "I've come to set Sybil free," the blonde announced.

  "As she enters the world, she will throw away what were once Marcia's dead vines and walk with me among newly budding trees, not in the winter of life but in the springtime."

  Silence. Dr. Wilbur tried to get the blonde to say more, but Vicky replied instead. "The blonde is Sybil's adolescence," Vicky said.

  "Isn't this late?" Dr. Wilbur asked. "She needs to be with Sybil now," Vicky replied.

  "Is there anybody else?" the doctor asked, as if she were reliving the first days of the analysis.

  "Why should there be?" Vicky seemed to shrug vocally. "We didn't expect the blonde, true. But as she told you, she has been around for nineteen years, although inactive. How could she have been active when Sybil, carrying the weight of childhood, bypassed adolescence in anything but a strictly physical, developmental sense?" Vicky paused. Then she added, "It was hard for Sybil to have a normal adolescence. She left so much of herself behind, fixed in childhood. Now that Sybil has scotched these childhood traumas, you should expect to find the lost adolescence returning in search of the gratification of maturity."

  As Vicky's words trailed off, the lilting yet stilted voice of the blonde was heard again. "I held back," she said, "until Sybil fell in love. When I realized that Ramon wouldn't work out, I rose to protect the adolescent Sybil from heartbreak. She was an adolescent, you know, when she was with Ramon."

  "If Sybil still wants to feel like an adolescent in love, there's no reason why she shouldn't," the doctor said. "People of all ages do this. She can function as an eighteen-year-old blonde at forty-two. Sybil can integrate you."

  "She has," the blonde replied. "I'm no threat to the final healing. In fact, I will make the wheels of that healing turn faster."

  "Have you been listening, Sybil?"

  Dr. Wilbur asked.

  "I have," Sybil replied. "And I know that this part of me who gave no name is telling the truth."

  The wish, personified by the dream girl, had brought new youth to the unlived life, to the womanhood aborted by depletion and discontinuity.

  Baffling, terrifying, life-renewing, the episode of the blonde's appearance proved to be the climax of Sybil's illness. After the event there were many days during which she just sat and absorbed the emotions, attitudes, knowledge, and experiences that since early June of that year the other selves had voluntarily shared with her. And while she took a new look at her emerging self, within her a tremendous reorganization of personality was taking place. The past blended with the present; the personalities of each of the selves with that of the others. The past returned, and with it the original child called Sybil, who had not existed as an entity since she was three and a half years old. Not everything came to a conscious level all at once, but the significant things that did were normal memory and a new sense of time. After thirty-nine years the clock was no longer incomprehensible.

  A week after the July 7 crisis Sybil was talking animatedly to Dr. Wilbur about her plans to become an occupational therapist. They would involve leaving New York.

  "The old fears seem to be gone," Dr. Wilbur remarked. "You sound well."

  "Oh, I am, Doctor," Sybil replied, smiling. "I've thrown my last fit. But I was fully conscious of everything that was happening during it. It was not the same way out I took in the past." She added: "And the blonde? Well, I feel she is with me. I know that I will never dissociate again."

  "You've never said that before," the doctor replied, "even during all this time when none of the others appeared."

  "I didn't say it," Sybil averred, "because never before did I feel that it was so."

  "We can tell," the doctor explained, "if all the memories of the others are now yours. Let's test it."

  Through the several hypnotic sessions that followed Dr. Wilbur matched Sybil's memories alongside those of the selves who still had individual identities.

  Not one of these selves had a single memory that Sybil did not also have.

  Sybil's attitude toward these selves, moreover, had completely changed, from initial denial to hostility to acceptance--even to love. Having learned to love these parts of herself, she had in effect replaced self-derogation with self-love. This replacement was an important measure of her integration and restoration.

  Three weeks after the July 7 crisis Dr. Wilbur hypnotized Sybil and called for Vicky Antoinette. "How are things going, Vicky?" the doctor asked. "What progress is there underneath?"

  "I'm part of Sybil now, you know," Vicky replied. "She always wanted to be like me. Now we are one. I used to say, "This or that event was before my time." Now I say, "It's after my time." You see, I'm no longer completely free."

  That was the last time that Dr. Cornelia B. Wilbur talked to Victoria Antoinette Scharleau.

  On September 2, 1965, Dr. Wilbur recorded in her daily analysis notes on the Dorsett case: "All personalities one."

  On September 30 it was moving day at the old brownstone. Sybil's furniture and paintings went to Pennsylvania, where she had obtained a job as an occupational therapist; she herself moved to Flora's apartment to spend the last two weeks in New York.

  The Sybil who entered Flora's apartment was new not only to Flora but even to herself. She was not what had been waking Sybil. Neither was she any one of the fifteen other selves. She was all of them. Like Miranda in The Tempest, she seemed to be standing on the threshold of discovery, almost literally crying out, "O, wonder: ar How many goodly creatures are there here: ar How beauteous mankind is: O brave new world, ar That has such people in't!"

  The world seemed new because she was new, real because, for the first time in her adult life, she was a whole and real self. As she took off her coat, settled her bags, and sank into a chair, she was silent. Then she said, "I've been here before--yet I haven't."

  "Who is the I?" Flora asked.

  "The one who can feel," Sybil replied. "I have new feelings now, real feelings. It's not the way it used to be."

  The "It's not the way it used to be" was the clue to the understanding that even though Sybil now had the feelings that for thirty-nine years the others had masked, her frame of reference was still that of the waking self.

  Flora had prepared a snack, and as they ate, they talked for a while about impersonal things. Then apropos of nothing that had previously been said, Sybil remarked, "Memories make a person mature emotionally." Although stated as a generalization, it was obvious to Flora that Sybil was referring to herself and was saying in effect: now that the others have returned their memories to me, I have been able to mature emotionally; now that I'm whole, I'm mature.

  Paradoxically, however, while this new Sybil seemed more mature, she also seemed younger than her forty-two years. The impression became even stronger when she remarked, "I'm discovering things that everybody else my age has known for a long time."

  The next morning at breakfast Sybil said, "I hoped for a time when I would know what I was doing all the time I was doing it." Then she added with a compelling intensity, "Now I can account for every minute. When I wake up, I know what I did yesterday and can plan what I'm going to do today." She looked at Flora and Flora's mother and asked with fervor, "Do you know what it mean
s to have a whole day ahead of you, a day you can call your own?"

  At last, after thirty-nine years of having it otherwise, a day for her was all its hours. Before, time had to be done away with by relegating it to other selves. Now time presented the opportunity for self-realization.

  Each morning as she planned the day ahead, her eyes sparkled and she betrayed an excitement that for anyone else would have been wholly out of proportion to the nature of the activity. The excitement continued with heightened awareness as the day unfolded and she did ordinary things--reading a book, watching television, talking.

  "I see a name of some public figure in the newspaper," she remarked to Flora one evening. "Hear it again on television. Then someone talks about it. I always recognize it!" There was a reminiscent torment in her eyes as she added, "There were many times I couldn't do that--in the past." She lingered on the phrase in the past with the fascination one feels for a bygone horror. Then elucidating the isolation, the alienation of what it had been like to be a multiple personality, she explained, "I'd see the name in the newspaper, but by the time we ran into it again on television, it was often not I who saw it but one of the others. When it came up in conversation, still somebody else might have been there. The parts didn't go together."

  Again she was using I as the frame of reference of the her, while waking self. Triumphantly she added, "Now the parts come together. The world seems whole."

  Her expression became suddenly wild as, looking fixedly at Flora, she remarked with earnest, "I know it doesn't seem like anything to other people to be able to see a whole television program without interference from within, but to me it's revelation!"