Sybil (49 page)

"Huh?" Peggy Lou, her back still turned and certain that she was being tricked, mumbled, "where did you come from?"

"I came from my house to see you."

"Where do you live?"

The doctor described her apartment and office. "Is it really Dr. Wilbur?" Peggy Lou asked incredulously.

"Yes."

"Is that girl still here?" Peggy Lou wanted to know.

"Yes."

"Tell her to go away. I won't come out until she does."

Finally Dr. Wilbur was able to cajole Peggy Lou into emerging from the hideaway.

A few months later, "that girl" did go away.

"I don't usually let anyone get close to me," Sybil remarked sadly to Dr. Wilbur.

"I did you and maybe Teddy. But look what happened."

In the autumn of 1959 Dr. Wilbur faced the fact that the Dorsett analysis was following a halting path. Progress was slow and resistances, strong. Sybil showed signs of marked improvement for longer or shorter periods; then one of the other selves would slide into depression, conflict, trauma, fear, self-destructiveness. All accomplishment suffered, and some accomplishments failed. One obvious external failure was that Sybil dropped out of school--too sick to learn.

Progress had to be more rapid. New action was essential. This Dr. Wilbur felt with increasing assurance and intensity.

She reread the hypnotic sessions Dr. Morton Prince had conducted with Christine Beauchamp and consulted colleagues for their opinions of the Dorsett case. The typical comment was: "Just keep going. You're doing fine." The advice was to continue along the route she had been following. She decided that being a pioneer was not all that it was cracked up to be.

Pondering the grave problems confronting both her patient and herself, Dr. Wilbur knew that she was facing a professional crisis.

Her conviction that straight psychoanalysis was the treatment of choice in the Dorsett case remained firm, yet she was willing to experiment as long as there was no threat to her patient or the treatment situation.

The doctor was aware, too, that she had strong feelings about Sybil not only as a patient but also as a human being.

Dr. Wilbur was convinced also that the manifestations of the multiplicity and the physical diseases that Sybil suffered were rooted in overwhelming childhood experiences that could be permanently changed through analysis.

The question that arose was: can I find a way to speed up the process of integration? The experience with pentothal had shown conclusively that symptomatology having to do with specific traumas and conflicts could and did disappear when the trauma was revealed and the conflict explicated clearly to the waking self.

Dr. Wilbur knew that to reinstitute pentothal was too dangerous because of the potential for addiction. She sought other means.

Her patient was a hysteric. Since the time of Charcot and Freud hysterics were known to be readily hypnotizable. Dr. Wilbur decided at least to investigate the potential of this technique. Before she had become a psychoanalyst, she had used hypnosis successfully with other patients. Now she would experiment with hypnosis in analysis. Once again she decided that she was ready to pioneer.

Toward the end of a gloomy and unfruitful analytic hour in the autumn of 1959, Dr. Wilbur said softly, "Sybil, when you first came to me in New York, you asked me to promise that I would not hypnotize you. I agreed, but there were tremendous disturbances I didn't understand then. Now I believe that hypnosis can help us."

Sybil replied quietly, "I have no objection."

The journey toward becoming one entered a new, intensified phase. Now, enveloped by the womb-like comfort of the doctor's office, cradled by the leavening power of hypnotic slumber, Sybil went back in time. The other selves went both back and forward--forward so that, through gradual stages, all could reach Sybil's age. Integration, Dr. Wilbur knew, would be simpler if all the selves were of the same age. Their very existence indicated a wedding to the traumas of the past and an immaturity in the total personality, both of which made integration impossible.

Two-year-old Ruthie was the natural point of embarkation. "How are you?" the doctor asked after summoning her in one of the earliest hypnotic sessions. "Are you all right?"

"Yes."

"Do you remember me?"

"Yes."

"When did you see me last?"

"Brown chair."

"Yes. Have you ever been here? When were you here?"

"One day and one more day."

"Yes, and what does the room look like?"

"Chair."

"Yes. What color are the walls here?"

"Green."

"That's right. You know, Ruthie, you are two. Isn't that right? Would you like to be three?"

"Yes."

"In ten minutes I'm going to say it is five minutes of seven. Between now and that time, you are going to grow up one whole year. It's going to be all right, Ruthie. You're going to grow up, and later all the others are going to grow up too. Would you like to?"

"Yes. Then I can color."

"You may draw all you want and make things with the colored pencils and crayons. Or you may help Sybil paint."

"I can?"

"Whenever she paints, you can help her."

"Yes."

"Anything else you would like to do?"

"Everything."

"Then you will help everybody do everything. And you are growing, growing, growing. You will never be so young again. When you get to be three, you will stay there for a little while and then you are going to grow again. I want you to pick a nice day to be three--a day you enjoyed."

"Aunt Fay."

"All right, you pick a day in the summer when you visited your aunt Fay."

"She was my Mama."

"She wasn't really. You liked to pretend she was your Mama. That was because your Mama wasn't very satisfactory, and we know that. We are going to help you grow up so that you don't have to worry about your Mama ever again. Do you understand, dear?"

"Yes."

Ruthie became three, with the doctor's full knowledge that this was no mere mechanical process, no simple suggestion. Age progression could only advance as the traumas and conflicts were resolved. Age progression was being utilized as the means to an end.

Two months later the doctor told Ruthie, "In ten minutes you will be six, and it will be spring. Then I will help you to grow up, to catch up with the others. In ten minutes, you will be six. You will never be any younger than that, and as we go on, you will get older. You will find that as you get older, you can do more about the things you want to do and you will do less about the things that other people want you to do. You will grow up one year, two years, three years, and you will pick a day that was good."

"Can Daddy help me make a grocery store in the haystack?"

"Then it is summer?" the doctor assumed. "Winter," Ruthie insisted.

"A haystack in the winter?"

"Uh. And there's snow on top of it. And you dig a hole in it and you put in the oatmeal box and empty cans and you make a store inside the haystack."

"All right. Now you are six years old."

"We're on the farm, and it's the winter time," Ruthie said.

This was the winter of Hattie Dorsett's catatonia and Sybil's camaraderie with her father. Ruthie had enjoyed the farm; she was free of her mother and close to her father.

"You are six years old and you will never again be less than that. I'm going to help you grow up to catch up to the others and finally to Sybil. Would you like that?"

"Yes."

"Now, when I touch your right elbow, I will ask to speak to Mike and Sid together. Sid. Mike."

"Hi."

"Hi. Would the two of you like to grow up?"

"Sure. I don't want to be a little sissy," Mike replied enthusiastically. "I want to grow up like Daddy and do what he can do."

"All right, both of you are going to start to become grown up. Now is there anything you would like to say to me before you are older?"

Mike posed a startling question: "You think the girls are going to kill us?"

"Do I think the girls are going to kill you?" the doctor repeated with disbelief.

"Yes," Mike replied apprehensively. "The girls? Which girls?" the doctor asked in an attempt to elucidate what Mike really meant.

"Marcia and Vanessa," Mike replied cryptically.

"If they kill them, will we die, too?" Sid asked with concern.

"I don't know whom you mean by "they,"" the doctor insisted.

"There's a rumor," Sid explained, "that the girls are going to kill each other, that the time is coming when some of them won't be."

"The time is coming," the doctor replied with emphasis, "when no one of you will be by yourself. All of you are going to work together. But now I want to get back to your question. Mike, are you listening? Sid? I want you to understand very clearly what I'm about to say. If Marcia and Vanessa were dead, you would be dead too. Therefore, you must help them to live and catch up with Sybil so they will not want to die."

"But they feel so bad," Sid said. "Yes, I know," the doctor replied softly. Then with intensity she added, "But you can help them to feel better. You can cheer them up. Nobody is going to kill anybody. And now you are getting older, older, older."

Dr. Wilbur felt reassured by the age progression sessions, especially since genuine analysis was taking place. The boys had just revealed suicidal intent on the part of other selves as well as their own fear that integration would result in death for them.

Getting older was the order of becoming until, by April, 1960, no one of the selves was less than eighteen. Sybil, however, was thirty-seven and three months. Since identity of ages constituted an important step toward integration, Dr. Wilbur talked with Vicky on April 21 about taking this step.

"I'm overwhelmed," Vicky replied, "at the thought of being that old."

"Shall we do it, Vicky?"

There was silence.

The psychoanalyst thought for a moment. Then she tried another approach. "Vicky, you're the one who knows everything about everybody; you're the memory trace, the positive force in the Sybil complex. Shouldn't you be her age when already you have all the memories of the years that make her older than you? Isn't that equity?"

"I suppose." Vicky was not enthusiastic about approaching forty. Then, lightly tapping her index finger on an end table, she remarked, "Have I ever told you that Sybil would like to be me but doesn't know how?"

"Making you her age will make it easier for her," the doctor explained. "Shall we?"

Vicky said softly, "You're the doctor." Then, when the patient was under an hypnotic spell, Dr. Wilbur asked, "Is everybody here?"

Someone said, "Yes."

"Ruthie," the doctor called.

"Yes," said Ruthie, now eighteen. "Mike," the doctor then asked, "would you like to be thirty-seven?"

"Sure," said Mike.

"Sid?"

"Sure," Sid replied.

When the doctor put the same question to Peggy Lou, the reply was, "Yes, if I have to do it."

"Well, you don't have to do it," the doctor replied. "What is your reservation?"

"Well," Peggy Lou hesitated. "I'll miss my television programs."

"Thirty-seven-year-olds watch television," the doctor said, laughing.

"I don't want to have to study all the time," Peggy Lou added apprehensively.

"No, studying all the time isn't good for anybody," the doctor replied. "You won't have to do that."

Peggy Lou gave her consent.

Then the doctor asked Peggy Ann, who replied, "Yes, I guess so."

"You sound a little doubtful," the doctor remarked.

"Well, will I have to go to church?" Peggy Ann wanted to know.

"No, you won't have to go to church," the doctor replied reassuringly.

"Other grown-ups do," Peggy Ann declared. "Sybil is grown up," the doctor pointed out, "and she doesn't go to church. You're eighteen now, and you don't go."

"Okay. Okay," Peggy Ann assented. The doctor called on each of the selves. Nancy Lou Ann, Marcia, Vanessa, Clara, Marjorie, Helen, and Sybil Ann had no objections. Mary, however, protested: "I feel so tired."

"If you were Sybil's age," the doctor argued, "you would not be as tired, and you would feel better because you would get help and support from the others. Wouldn't you like that?"

"Would you still be my friend?" Mary asked apprehensively.

"You bet your life," the doctor replied emphatically.

"You won't leave me?" Mary asked. "I won't leave you," the doctor promised.

"Very well," Mary finally agreed. "Vicky," the doctor asked, "are you ready?"

"I'll take the plunge," Vicky declared. "Is everybody all set?" asked the doctor.