Sybil (14 page)

"I can't stay," the woman said, "I'm late for a hairdresser's appointment. Since I knew I'd be passing here, I thought I'd stop and give you this. You've done so much for me, Sybil. I want you to have it."

The woman handed Sybil a lovely handcrafted silver pendant with a beautiful blue stone, lapis lazuli. I don't know why she's giving me this, Sybil thought. "Thank you," she replied faintly as she hesitatingly accepted the pendant.

"See you soon," the woman said and was gone. See you soon? Done so much for her? It's so unreal. Have I spoken to her before? I've seen her around, but we have never exchanged a single word.

Yet she acted as if we were friends. Friends? The confusion raged.

Return to the desk. Try to study.

Sybil found herself clinging to realities. Even while she did so, however, she realized that the time-honored conundrum, the terrible thing, had overtaken her again. It had been the reality of her life to have something happen that had no beginning and to experience the painfully familiar "This is where I came in" feeling, with its tantalizing withholding of everything that had gone before.

Study for the exam. As Sybil sat at her desk, however, the pages of the education text blurred with her panic, and she asked herself fervently: Will there never be an end that also has a beginning? Will there never be continuity bridging the awful void between now and some other time, a time in the future, a time in the past?

Victoria Antoinette Scharleau, who knew everything, watched Marian Ludlow give Sybil the silver pendant.

Why

Dr. Wilbur adjusted her desk lamp beam a fraction. Before her was almost the whole of the relatively sparse literature about multiple personality. In a pensive mood after Vicky had left her office, she had made a trip to the Academy of Medicine Library, where a librarian had assembled for her almost everything there was on this definitely established but rare illness. Morton Prince's The Dissociation of a Personality, first published in 1905, which is well known to students of abnormal psychology, was the only one of the books she had read before. She had tried to get hold of a copy of Dr. Corbey H. Thigpen's and Dr. Hervey Cleckley's 1954 article: "A Case of Multiple Personality" in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology, about which some of her colleagues were talking. But this article, about a girl whose pseudonym was Eve, had not been available at the time.

Now, however, as she read into the night, the names Mary Reynolds, Mamie, Felida X, Louis Vive, Ansel Bourne, Miss Smith, Mrs. Smead, Silas Prong, Doris Fisher, and Christine Beauchamp became known to the doctor. These were the people with multiple personalities whom medical history had recorded: seven women and three men. [Others have been recorded since.] The newly reported case of Eve made it eight women, and Eve was the only multiple personality known to be alive.

Mary Reynolds, the doctor learned, was the first recorded multiple personality. Her case had been reported in 1811 by Dr. L. Mitchell, of the University of Pennsylvania.

Mamie's case had been described in the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal of May 15, 1890. Following that had come reports of Felida X by M. Azam; of Louis Vive, studied by several French observers; of Ansel Bourne, observed by Dr. Richard Hodgson and by Professor William James; of Miss Smith, by M. Flournoy; and of Mrs. Smead, by Professor Hyslop. In 1920, as part of a volume entitled The Ungeared Mind, by Robert Howland Chase, there had been the recapitulation of "The Strange Case of Silas Prong," a ease of multiple personality previously described by Professor William James.

The complexity of these cases, the doctor realized even after a cursory glance, varied markedly. In cases like those of Miss Smith and Mrs. Smead, which involved dual rather than multiple personalities, the secondary personality, while possessing the faculties of a full human being, exhibited very little independence in voluntarily moving about in a social world--working, acting, and playing. Clearly this characteristic was not true of Sybil. Her alternating personalities were obviously autonomous.

Cases like those of Felida X, Christine Beauchamp, and Doris Fisher were more interesting, for they were examples of independent personalities in the same body, leading their own lives as any other mortal. Miss Beauchamp had three selves; Doris Fisher, five. It was to this type, the doctor speculated, that Sybil belonged. But Sybil's case--again it was only speculation--seemed more complex than that either of Miss Beauchamp or of Doris Fisher.

Well, if it is, it is, the doctor thought, hypothesizing that in Sybil's case there were probably multiple roots. What those roots were, however, was at this stage unknown.

For a time Dr. Wilbur pondered. Then, beginning to read again, she searched for when, in these other cases, the first dissociation had taken place. She had no idea of when Sybil had dissociated for the first time and whether all the personalities had emerged then or whether some had come later. When had Christine Beauchamp first dissociated? According to Prince, it had taken place when Christine was eighteen and as the result of a nervous shock.

Dr. Wilbur didn't actually know, but she surmised that Sybil's first dissociation had taken place during her childhood. The childishness of Peggy seemed to be a clue. And probably there had been a shock for Sybil, too. But what? So little had been revealed that it was all but impossible even to speculate about causes. But, hypothesizing, the doctor thought that possibly there had been multiple roots, or shocks, leading to multiple selves, personifying reactions to those shocks. Many other selves could thus be translated into multiple childhood traumas, multiple roots sprouting into this complex condition.

The Dorsett case was taking on the aspect of an adventure, a whodunit of the unconscious, and Dr. Wilbur became even more excited when she realized that Sybil was the first multiple personality to be psychoanalyzed. This meant that not only would they be breaking new ground, but also that the doctor, through psychoanalysis, would be able to bring a much greater psychological sophistication to an understanding of Sybil than had been available hitherto. Dr. Wilbur's pulse quickened at the challenge and at its possible implications not only for Sybil but for the largely unchartered field of multiple personality.

The analysis, Dr. Wilbur decided, would have to be an unorthodox one. She smiled as she thought; an unorthodox analysis by a maverick psychiatrist. She did consider herself a maverick and knew that it was this characteristic that would stand her in good stead in dealing with this extraordinary case. She knew that she would have to utilize the spontaneous reactions of all the selves not only in uncovering the origin of the illness, but also in treating it. She knew that it would be necessary to treat each of the selves as a person in her own right and to winnow away the reserve of Sybil, the waking self. Otherwise the total Sybil Dorsett would never get well. The doctor knew, too, that she would have to make tremendous sacrifices of time and modify her usual consulting-room Freudian techniques to the harnessing of every shred of spontaneity that would help her break through to the truth that lay concealed behind these selves.

The pivotal question was: why had Sybil become a multiple personality? Is there a physical predisposition toward the development of a multiple personality? Do genetic factors play a part? No one knew. The doctor believed, however, that Sybil's condition stemmed from some childhood trauma, though at this stage she couldn't be certain. To date analysis had revealed certain pervading fears--of getting close to people, of music, of hands --that seemed connected with a trauma. Telltale, too, were the seething rage, repressed in Sybil but bursting forth unbridled in Peggy Lou, and the denial of mother in both Peggy Lou and Vicky. The feeling of entrapment strongly suggested trauma.

Many characteristics were common to several of the cases. The waking self, corresponding to the Sybil who had presented herself in Omaha and New York, typically seemed reserved and overnice. The doctor hypothesized that perhaps it was the very repression in this kind of temperament that made it necessary to relegate the emotions that had been repressed to another personality. The books talked of the secondary selves as depleting the waking self of emotions, attitudes, modes of behavior, and acquisitions.

But depletion was the effect, not the cause, of the condition. What in Sybil's case had caused it? What was the original trauma?

In the morning Dr. Wilbur approached the Dorsett appointment hour, as she now always did, wondering "who" would be there. It was Vicky. That was a good start, for Vicky claimed to know everything about the case.

Hunting for the original trauma, the doctor asked Vicky, on this her second appearance in the office, just two days after the first, whether she knew why Peggy Lou was afraid of music, as had become evident in a recent session, and why music deeply disturbed her.

"Music hurts," Vicky replied, elevating her eyebrows and looking at the doctor through the thin wreaths of smoke that came from the doctor's cigarette. "It hurts way inside because it is beautiful, and it makes both Sybil and Peggy Lou sad. They're sad because they're alone and nobody cares. When they hear music, they feel more alone than ever."

Could this, the doctor thought, relate to the original trauma? Possibly it involved the lack of caring, perhaps the lack of nurturing. When she asked why something beautiful should hurt, Vicky replied cryptically: "It's like love."

Then, looking steadily at Vicky, the doctor asked, "Was there something about love that hurt?"

"There was," Vicky replied straightforwardly yet cautiously.

When the doctor asked how precisely love had hurt, Vicky became even more cautious. "Doctor," she said, "Sybil doesn't want to love anybody. It's because she's afraid of getting close to people. You've seen how she's been here. It's all part of the same mosaic--the fear of hands coming at her, the fear of people, the fear of music, the fear of love. All have hurt her. All have made her afraid. All have made her sad and alone."

The doctor, very much aware that Vicky was describing the very symptoms, with the addition of love, that she herself had pondered the night before, wished that this co-analyzed of hers would get down to causes. "Vicky," she asked in an oblique attempt to steer her in that direction, "do you share any of these fears?"

"Certainly not," Vicky replied.

"Why is Sybil afraid when you're not?" the doctor persisted.

"That is an essential difference between Sybil and me. I can do what I want to do because I'm not afraid."

"But why aren't you?"

"I have no reason to be, and that's why I'm not." That was as far as Vicky would commit herself. "Poor Sybil," she sighed, changing the thrust of the conversation, "what a trial it has been. She's all choked up. She has an almost constant pain in her head and her throat. She can't cry. And she won't. Everyone was against her when she cried."

"Who is everyone?" the doctor asked hopefully.

"Oh, I'd rather not say," Vicky replied with a cautious smile. "After all, I was not a member of the family. I only lived with them."

Victoria Antoinette Scharleau closed the door that had swung at least partly ajar. Yet there had been a ray of light. The lack of caring, perhaps the lack of nurturing that the doctor had begun to suspect, had assumed greater probability with Vicky's placing the blame for Sybil's inability to cry squarely within the Dorsett family.

Things happened so fast. As Dr. Wilbur pondered this last thought, all at once, noiselessly and with a transition so slight as to be almost imperceptible, the assurance of Victoria Antoinette Scharleau slipped. The aplomb that was characteristic of her disappeared. The eyes that had been serene dilated with the fears that had been recounted. Vicky, who was not a member of the Dorsett family, had returned the body to Sybil, who was.

Startled at finding herself on the couch, sitting close to the doctor, Sybil moved abruptly away. "What happened?" she asked. "I don't remember coming here today. Another fugue?"

Dr. Wilbur nodded. This, she decided, was the moment to spell out what these fugues really were. The analysis would proceed more rapidly, she believed, if Sybil knew about the other selves. Then the doctor could confront her with what the other personalities had said and bring her closer to the memories from which she seemed barred.

"Yes," the doctor told Sybil. "You had another fugue. But it's more complicated than that."

"I'm afraid."

"Of course you are, sweetie," the doctor replied consolingly. "Now tell me, you've never said this to me, but I think you're aware that time goes by without your knowing that it has." Sybil was rigid. "Are you?" When Sybil didn't answer, the doctor persisted: "You know that you have lost time here?"

After a long pause Sybil replied in subdued tones, "I promised myself I would tell you, but I haven't dared."

Then the doctor asked: "What do you think you do in the time you lose?"

"Do?" Sybil replied. The doctor could see that it was an echo more than a concept. "I don't do anything."

"You go right on saying or doing something, even though you're not aware of saying or doing it." The doctor was unrelenting. "It's like walking in your sleep."

"What do I do?"

"Did anyone ever tell you?"

"Well, yes." Sybil lowered her eyes. "All my life I've been told that I had done certain things that I knew I hadn't. I let it go. What else could I do?"