Sybil

SYBIL The Family Tree: The Hierarchy of the Sixteen Selves

SYBIL ISABEL DORSETT Vicky Marcia Vanessa Mary Helen Clara Sybil Ann The Blonde

SYBIL ISABEL DORSETT Peggy Ann Peggy Lou Mike Sid Nancy Lou Ann

SYBIL ISABEL DORSETT Marjorie Ruthie Cast of Characters and Dates of "Birth"

Sybil Isabel Dorsett (1923): a depleted person; the waking self.

Victoria Antoinette Scharleau (1926): nicknamed Vicky; a self-assured, sophisticated, attractive blonde; the memory trace of Sybil's selves.

Peggy Lou Baldwin (1926): an assertive, enthusiastic, and often angry pixie with a pug nose, a Dutch haircut, and a mischievous smile.

Peggy Ann Baldwin (1926): a counterpart of Peggy Lou with similar physical characteristics; she is more often fearful than angry.

Mary Lucinda Saunders Dorsett (1933): a thoughtful, contemplative, maternal, homeloving person; she is plump and has long dark-brown hair parted on the side.

Marcia Lynn Dorsett (1927): last name sometimes Baldwin; a writer and painter; extremely emotional; she has a shield-shaped face, gray eyes, and brown hair parted on the side.

Vanessa Gail Dorsett (1935): intensely dramatic and extremely attractive; a tall redhead with a willowy figure, light brown eyes, and an expressive oval face.

Mike Dorsett (1928): one of Sybil's two male selves; a builder and a carpenter; he has olive skin, dark hair, and brown eyes.

Sid Dorsett (1928): one of Sybil's two male selves; a carpenter and a general handyman; he has fair skin, dark hair, and blue eyes.

Nancy Lou Ann Baldwin (date undetermined): interested in politics as fulfillment of biblical prophecy and intensely afraid of Roman Catholics; fey; her physical characteristics resemble those of the Peggys.

Sybil Ann Dorsett (1928): listless to the point of neurasthenia; pale and timid with ash-blonde hair, an oval face, and a straight nose. Ruthie Dorsett (date undetermined): a baby; one of the lesser developed selves. Clara Dorsett (date undetermined): intensely religious; highly critical of the waking Sybil.

Helen Dorsett (1929): intensely afraid but determined to achieve fulfillment; she has light brown hair, hazel eyes, a straight nose, and thin lips. Marjorie Dorsett (1928): serene, vivacious, and quick to laugh; a tease; a small, willowy brunette with fair skin and a pug nose.

The Blonde (1946): nameless; a perpetual teenager; has blonde curly hair and a lilting voice.

The New Sybil (1965): the seventeenth self; an amalgam of the other sixteen selves.

Preface:

This book goes to press over ten years after I first met the woman to whom I have given the pseudonym Sybil Isabel Dorsett.

Sybil wants to maintain anonymity, and when you read her true story, you will understand why. But Sybil Isabel Dorsett is a real person.

Our first meeting took place on an autumn evening in 1962 at a restaurant on New York City's Madison Avenue. Dr. Cornelia B. Wilbur, Sybil's psychoanalyst, had arranged the meeting so that I could become acquainted with Sybil.

Sybil seemed constrained and remote. I knew that this was because of her illness. Dr. Wilbur and she had embarked on one of the most complex and most bizarre cases in the history of psychiatry--the first psychoanalysis of a multiple personality.

I had known about the case for some years. Dr. Wilbur's and my paths had often crossed through my work as psychiatry editor of Science Digest and as the author of articles about psychiatric subjects. A few of these articles, in fact, had been about her cases.

The meeting was arranged for a specific purpose: Dr. Wilbur wondered whether I would be interested in writing about Sybil. It was not sufficient, the doctor believed, to present this history-making case in a medical journal, because in addition to great medical significance, the case had broad psychological and philosophical implications for the general public.

I wanted to wait for the outcome of the case prior to committing myself irrevocably to the book. In the meantime, Sybil and I became friends. We shared many intellectual interests, had an unmistakable affinity. Sybil became a frequent visitor in my apartment. She often confided in me about what had taken place in the analytic sessions, and what took place when she was in my home often found its way into the sessions.

Gradually, the idea of the book became more intriguing to me. I have written widely, and not without recognition, about psychiatry, and have a strong psychology and psychiatry background. By 1962 I had worked with many psychiatrists on their cases. Even my political profiles, many of which were written for national magazines, are strongly psychological in orientation. In addition, I am a college professor (currently at the City University of New York's John Jay College of Criminal Justice). My academic fields are English and speech; the literary bequest of the one and the closeness of speech scholarship to psychological scholarship prepared me to approach the subject of Sybil. Moreover, I had been in the theater, in radio and television, had written short stories and plays, and had taught writing at the New School for Social Research. All factors seemed to coalesce to make me want to transmute the clinical details of Sybil's story into a book in which I could capture that story's inherent drama.

I also wanted to write the book because of my friendship with Sybil and Dr. Wilbur, whose courage in pursuing the uncharted course of a very special analysis I greatly admired. I had great regard for Dr. Wilbur, an analyst with impressive credentials. She had a large Park Avenue practice and was prominent in a variety of psychiatric organizations, notably the Society of Medical Psychoanalysts and the Academy of Psychiatry. President of the National Association of Private Psychiatric Hospitals, she also served on the research committee of the Society of Medical Psychoanalysts that produced an important volume entitled Homosexuality: A Psychoanalytic View. Today, no longer in private practice, Dr. Wilbur is a full professor of psychiatry at the Medical School of the University of Kentucky.

Thus it was, after knowing Sybil and her other selves for three years, that I made my commitment and began to do formal research for this book. The confidences I shared with Sybil and Dr. Wilbur and my direct contacts with the other selves had to be supplemented by a systematized approach to the case as a whole and to Sybil's total life. I read widely in the medical literature about multiple personality, and I discussed the general aspects of the case with various psychiatrists in addition to Dr. Wilbur. I retraced the outer odyssey of Sybil's life by talking with persons who had known her in her midwestern home town, which I call Willow Corners, in Omaha, and in New York. I also literally retraced the steps Sybil had taken during some of her strange travels as another personality. In Philadelphia, for instance, I counted the number of steps to the front door of the Broadwood Hotel.

To unfold this extraordinary saga of a chilling, dizzying kaleidoscope of fascinating events, I had first to disentangle them. Clues evolved through a minute exploration of every single document connected with Sybil's eleven-year analysis. These included Dr. Wilbur's daily notes, jotted in pencil on prescription pads, in the course of 2,354 office sessions; Sybil's essays, written as part of the treatment procedure; and recordings of those analytic sessions that were taped. I also studied Sybil's diaries, kept from adolescence through the first year of the analysis; letters; family and hospital records; and the newspapers and records of the town of Willow Corners during the year in which the Dorsett family lived there.

Through these ten years--during seven of which I was actively working on the book--I was intimately associated with Dr. Wilbur and Sybil, both of whom, sometimes separately, sometimes together, stood ready to "sit" for the portrait. Our roles were quite distinct, however. I was recreating what Sybil had already lived and the doctor had already analyzed. But never, perhaps, did an author have more "giving" subjects. In fact, in response to any questioning, they, too, reassessed many aspects of the analysis. For me there was also the satisfaction of being able always to check the medical facts of this case with a doctor who was never farther away than the nearest telephone.