In 1954, a thin, nervous young woman walked into the office of New York psychiatrist Cornelia Wilbur complaining of unusual "spells". She would inexplicably "lose time", fading out of consciousness and coming to again hours or even days later, often in an unfamiliar city and wearing clothing she never remembered buying. Believing it to be a case of hysteria, Dr. Wilbur embarks on what she thinks will be a routine course of treatment. Until, that is, her patient strode into the office one day with a confident, almost aristocratic air. "Sybil couldn't come," she says, "you can call me Vicky." Dr. Wilbur realized she was dealing with a victim of multiple personality disorder, then almost unheard of. For Dr. Wilbur and the young woman (whom the author gives the pseudonym of Sybil) it was the beginning of an emotionally exhausting eleven-year journey to make a fractured human being whole again.
In the course of her treatment, Sybil proved to have no less than sixteen different personalities (including two male alters, Mike and Sid). The sophisticated Vicky was the "record keeper" of the selves, holding back the memories too painful for Sybil and the others to know. Peggy Lou was the repository of Sybil's anger--defiant, belligerent, contemptuous of Sybil and terrified of breaking glass; Vanessa, a redhead with impressive musical talent. Some, like Ruthie, were barely more than toddlers mentally.
Vicky had good reason to keep the memories in check. Sybil had endured a childhood so horrible the word "nightmarish" doesn't do it justice. The child of a schizophrenic mother, (called "Hattie") and a passive, distant Fundamentalist father, Sybil never knew what awful or outlandish thing her mother was liable to do. An abused child before the term existed, Sybil was forced to endure physical and sexual torture that seems chilling even in our tabloid tell-all age. Rape and inexplicable, unnecessary forced enemas were a daily ritual until the age of six or seven--the angry, frightened Peggy Lou had to emerge to endure the unending agony.
Schreiber paints a vivid portrait of Sybil's family and the conservative town in which she grew up, and while we discover a clear history of schizophrenia on the maternal side of Sybil's family, Schreiber places most of the blame at the feet of Sybil's father Willard. He had known of his wife Hattie's schizophrenia from the time Sybil was six, when Hattie submerged into a mysterious catatonic state for an entire winter. Yet he made no attempt to hospitalize her, weakly protesting that he couldn't separate a mother and her child. The child's one escape from this hellish woman came in the form of her grandmother--when she died, Sybil's self disappeared. When she re-emerges, she finds herself in a fifth-grade classroom--almost two years later.
After years of harrowing, almost fatal crises, Sybil's selves are eventually reunited in 1965--when she is forty-two. For forty of those years, she was a living mosaic, a collection of parts. Hers was touted as a classic case of MPD and childhood abuse. Yet, not long after the death of the real Sybil in the early nineties, controversy arose over the accuracy of the account. Some professionals alleged that Sybil had not been a multiple personality at all, and may in fact have never been abused. Dr. Wilbur knew this, they maintain, as did the author--the "personalities" had supposedly been planted in Sybil's mind under hypnosis. The truth may never be known, but it is an undeniable fact such cases do occur, and as such, "Sybil" is a primer for anyone wanting to know the nature and origins of multiple personality.
