Sybil (39 page)

The room reverberated with menace as Clara replied: "Sybil doesn't have to live!"

Standing in Dr. Wilbur's consulting room the next day was Nancy Lou Ann Baldwin. The traffic noises emanating from the street below that made their way into the room were to Nancy the dread sounds of explosion; for she lived on the outer rim of terror.

"I don't like things to blow up," Nancy remarked now. "Exploding, always exploding. It's just as bad as a bomb when you're little and your mother throws blocks at you, things hit you, you get all tied up, and you get dizzy and you see little spots running around. And there is noise, an awful banging, as bad as a bomb when you're little. The worst of it is mother is not dead."

"Your mother is buried in Kansas City. There are no explosions that will injure you now." The doctor's words of assurance were an incantation.

"I don't see how you know that," Nancy protested. "Mother can be buried in Kansas City and exploding in my mind at the same time. Besides, there are many other kinds of explosions I can name, and I can't see how you can prevent them. You can't keep the gas main or a furnace from blowing up."

"Your house doesn't have a gas furnace." The doctor struck a realistic, practical note to allay the terror.

Nancy's fey reply as her lips briefly curled in amusement was, "Well, I suppose it has to be a big poof to be an explosion." Terror returned as she added: "But you can't keep the world itself from blowing up. And that will be a big poof."

"The world is not going to blow up, Nancy," said Dr. Wilbur.

"Why, then, have they built civil defense shelters?" Nancy replied promptly. "Why do we see signs of the end everywhere? Satan will destroy the world and God will make it perfect, so there will be no more sin. In the final war, in Armageddon, everything will be destroyed, according to prophecy."

"The time has not come." Dr. Wilbur was determined to free Nancy of her obsession.

"Before the end, prophecy tells us," Nancy continued, heedless of the interruption, ""The rivers will dry up, and they will be as blood." Before the end, prophecy also tells us, the Catholics will come into power and control the government and men's minds. We're seeing both things happening. Everywhere we read about rivers that have been polluted. Pollution is the blood of which prophecy speaks. And since you can't live very long without water, we all shall die as prophecy predicts. The prophecy about the Catholics is also being fulfilled. The Catholics started a long time ago by building schools and colleges. But they couldn't do much until 1936 or 1939, I'm not sure which. Anyway, they couldn't do much before the Vatican was recognized as a free state, with a right to speak out. And the Catholics have become more powerful since that time.

"The time will come, Dr. Wilbur, when, if you don't worship the Catholic priests, popes and cardinals, it'll be for you the way it was for the Jews under the Nazis. The Catholics are going to get more and more powerful, and if we're smart, we won't let any Catholic run for president. If they get in, they will assume control of education. They want a Catholic commissioner of education even more than they want a president. By controlling the children, they know they can also control the parents. They won't lose a single chance to enslave us all."

Nancy moved restlessly and apprehensively around the room. She turned to the doctor, saying: "I never will be a Catholic. I will never, never do what they order me to do, and I'm afraid of what they'll do. I don't want to be shut up in a prison. But I won't do what they will demand of me."

The hidden pathways of hysteria were no longer hidden. The crescendo of powerful feeling filled the small room with the mounting sweep of a full orchestra. Nancy collapsed onto the couch. "Doctor"--the words were being wrung out slowly-- "sometimes I'm so frightened by all this that I'd rather die right now."

Dr. Wilbur answered quietly, softly, "Why should you want to die? There would be too much to give up. Loving people. Making things. Enjoying music, art, nature." Then the doctor added pointedly, meaningfully: "Getting together with Sybil and finding yourself."

The mood was broken. Terror was replaced by anger and defensiveness. "Why are you cornering me?" Nancy asked.

"My dear, I'm not cornering you," the doctor replied reassuringly. "I'm just trying to make you see that there is no reason for you to die."

"No reason?" Nancy replied thoughtfully. "There are private reasons, public reasons."

"What are the private reasons?" the doctor asked quietly, fully aware that, despite the turbulence of the outcry, this was her first encounter with Nancy.

"Oh," Nancy replied, "all of us are trying to get Sybil to do things, and it doesn't work. Being linked with Sybil is a constant frustration. It makes me angry, frightened. And sometimes I feel as if I'd like to curl up like a baby, free of responsibility. But then I'm very close to the Peggys, and you know how they feel about Sybil. Sybil makes Peggy Lou just simmer all the time."

Suddenly shifting into a relaxed, casual mood Nancy explained, "I'm so close to the Peggys I took both their middle names. But they use the name Dorsett. I don't. I'm Nancy Lou Ann Baldwin. Miss Baldwin was a teacher Sybil pretended to be at the time I came."

"What are the other private things that worry you, Nancy?" the doctor wanted to know. "What do you want to do that you can't?"

"Walk on legs that are not weak," was the surprising reply. "I want to go places and do things. One can't, you know, with Sybil."

"We can fix it so you can," the doctor promised.

"I'm afraid we can't," Nancy replied bluntly. "But just now I'm even more troubled by public concerns." The terror had returned to her eyes. "The Catholics," she warned, "will sneak in when we least suspect. They'll catch us."

"They won't catch me because I'm not afraid of them, and I don't believe as you do. I believe ..."

"There isn't that much time left," Nancy interrupted hysterically. Then, quieter, she repeated, "I'd like to die. But God doesn't let me. You see I'd have to do it to me, and suicide is just as wrong as if I followed the Catholics' orders. It would give my soul to the devil either way."

"Now, Nancy ..." The doctor tried to break the mood by injecting another point of view.

But Nancy cut her short. "And I don't want the devil to win!"

"Nancy," the doctor replied, changing the subject completely, "if you and Clara and some of the others--especially Marcia--would join Sybil ..."

"Clara has the same trouble about religion that I do," Nancy interrupted again. "Her worry's the same as mine. I'm sure when she talked to you yesterday, she must have told you the same things that ..."

This time it was the doctor who interrupted. "If you and Clara help Sybil to be strong and do the things Sybil wants to do," the doctor remarked pointedly, "then there will be another person to help maintain the democracy you're afraid the Catholics will take away." Absorbed in her own thoughts, Nancy replied in a different vein, "you're always supposed to be prepared for the day the Catholics destroy our democracy. You have to look out for it!"

"Nancy," the doctor insisted in a firm, strong voice, "God gives us our brains to use ..."

"Sure." Again Nancy had broken into the doctor's words. "And He gave us the prophecies to know how to use our brains to get ready for the struggle against Catholic assumption of power."

"Now Nancy ..." the doctor began. "He did!" Nancy insisted vehemently.

"God gave us our brains to use," Dr. Wilbur explained. "You should not waste them in unfounded worry."

Nancy protested: "But He said to turn from the powers of darkness unto the powers of light, and that means to follow Him."

"Now in this country we have consistently had freedom of religion and freedom of worship," Dr. Wilbur reminded Nancy.

"It has failed," Nancy replied.

"Because our government is a government of the people," the doctor continued, "you and I are just as much a part of our government as anyone else and ..."

"I know those things," Nancy interrupted sharply.

"Now that means," the doctor affirmed, "that if you're so afraid of our losing our democracy, you and Clara should join Sybil so that Sybil can do all of the things that she is capable of doing to help other people to turn from the powers of darkness."

"Excuse me, Dr. Wilbur," a voice that was not Nancy's interrupted. "I think I should say something here."

"Yes, Vicky?" The doctor knew the voice well.

"Well, you'll excuse me for saying it because you know I don't say anything anymore except when it is absolutely necessary. But I think you're making a mistake in telling Nancy that. You see, Sybil has the same fears and worries that Nancy and Clara have. As a matter of fact, even though Marcia thinks she's breaking away from religion, she has those same fears too."

"Yes?"

"And I've been trying to help Nancy, Clara, Marcia, and Sybil. It's been better. You said to me one time, "Vicky, why don't you help Sybil?"' and I've been doing that. But if Nancy and Clara join Sybil now, with this great fear that they have, it would add that fear to those Sybil already has. I'm afraid it will be too much fear in one place. That's one reason that I've stopped encouraging Nancy and Clara to come closer. Why bring them closer when they aren't bringing us more strength? They have hold of the wrong things: not only extreme worries about religion but also depression and suicide ideas --more than they'd ever tell you and much more than they've said here. I don't want them to bring these things to Sybil because I'm not sure that even I am strong enough to fight all of that. I won't say anymore. I just don't think it is sensible to try to bring Nancy and Clara closer to Sybil at this time."

"It would be a mistake, Vicky," Dr. Wilbur informed her co-analysand, "if I weren't going to do anything to change the worries of Nancy and Clara. Right? But I have every intention of doing so. Now if Nancy will let me talk for a little while longer, I think I can straighten out a few things."

"All right," Vicky replied, "I'll let Nancy come back. But please, Dr.

Wilbur, remember my caution. It's more than a caution. It's a warning."

As Dr. Wilbur realized that five new selves had been revealed, she looked back to the time when, after first meeting Vicky, she had pored over the literature of multiple personality. She had then speculated that Sybil's case was more complex than that of either Miss Beauchamp or of Doris Fisher. Now she knew that the case of Sybil Dorsett, precipitated not by one trauma but by a multiplicity of traumas, was the most complex ever reported.

The multiple roots of Sybil's complexity--the schizophrenic mother aided and abetted by the peripheral, passive father, the naive and hypocritical environment, and the hysteria engendered by the fundamentalist faith, particularly as exemplified by Grandpa Dorsett--had been dissected and interpreted. But the doctor still did not know when the first dissociation had taken place, though she did know that not all the selves had emerged during the first dissociation and that all who so far had presented themselves had been in existence by the time Sybil was twelve years old. Whether, with fourteen alternating selves in evidence, there were still selves to come, the doctor could not determine.

Even though evidence of mental illness on both sides of the family suggested a possible genetic factor, Dr. Wilbur was certain that the illness had been environmentally induced. Dr. Wilbur knew that the analysis must continue to uproot specific incidents of environmental abuse in order to alleviate the illness.

The selves, the doctor was now convinced, were not conflicting parts of the total self, struggling for identity, but rather defenses against the intolerable environment that had produced the childhood traumas. Sybil's mind and body were possessed by these others--not invading spirits, not dybbuks from without, but proliferating parts of the original child. Each self was younger than Sybil, with their ages shifting according to the time of the particular trauma that each had emerged to battle.

With the revelation of the five new selves, the strategy of treatment remained what it had been before--to uproot and analyze the traumas, thus rendering unnecessary the defense against each particular trauma and the self who did the defending. Integration would be accomplished by getting the various selves to return to Sybil, the depleted, waking self, the acquisitions and modes of behavior that they had stolen from the original Sybil. They had to return the knowledge, the experiences, and the memories that had become theirs in the third of the total Sybil's life that they and not Sybil had lived.

A stepped-up onslaught on the underlying traumas was now clearly indicated, an onslaught during which each self would have to be analyzed as a "person" in her and his own right. Ultimately, of course, all would have to be integrated with waking Sybil. Integration, however, was still a distant goal, the more distant because of the complicating emergence of new selves. The glimmers of integration that had already occurred had been short-lived.

Dr. Wilbur also realized soberly that there were risks to be faced. The very act of facing an uprooted trauma, by intensifying the pain, often functioned as a setback. There was no assurance that uprooting the trauma would lead to partial integration of the self who defended against it. Sybil might be torn further apart by the very therapy intended to cure her. But the illness was so severe, the need for integration so great, that all possible risks were warranted in a newly intensified struggle.