Sybil (36 page)

"But this is a woman's body. ..."

"Doctor, I want to tell you something." It was Mike, speaking in a firm clear voice in which he seemed to be pushing Sid aside to assume control of the situation. "If I pushed hard, I could push it out."

"But you have tried," the doctor pointed out, enunciating each word with care, "and you haven't pushed it out."

"I could, though." The certainty of Mike's tone was matched by the confident look in his eyes.

"If you could, you would have," the doctor insisted. "You're just saying that," Mike replied with a broad, infectious grin.

"No, I'm not just saying that. This is the truth for both you and Sid," the doctor reminded her patients. "Boys in a girl's body don't grow up to be men."

Unconvinced, Mike asked, "If I give a girl a baby, will it be mine?"

"Mike," the doctor replied firmly, "I cannot say yes to the impossible. In this body in which you reside there is a uterus, ovaries, a vagina. Each of these is just as special, just as precious as a penis in a man's body. Without the woman's organs as well as the man's, the perpetuation of the human race would be impossible. It takes a woman's organs as well as a man's to produce a baby. Now, in this body-- your body, Mike--there is a pair of ovaries, where the eggs are. ..."

"I don't want those sissy girl organs," Mike interrupted, "and I don't have them. Not me--I'm a boy."

"Mike, you only have half of what it takes to create a baby, and it is not the half you think you have. All of these parts of the body--the woman's organs and the man's--are important for both the woman and the man. But no one of them is more important than the other. None of them is dirty. You understand that?"

"I'm built like my Dad, like Grandpa was," Mike protested. "I can give a girl a baby if I want to. How many times do I have to tell you that if I pushed hard enough, I could push it out?"

"Why don't you try?"

"I will when I'm older."

"Mike, you do not have a penis or the two little sacks, the testicles, that hang down below the penis and contain the male cells. Without these you cannot give a girl a baby."

"Not ever?" Mike asked. "Not ever?" His tone, for the first time since he had presented himself to the doctor, was somber, subdued.

"No, not ever."

He replied with urgency: "But I want to I want to. I have to!"

Mike Dorsett could not accept the special facts of his life.

Of the two, Mike proved in analysis to be the more aggressive; Sid was the more thoughtful. This was quite appropriate in terms of their identification-- Mike with his grandfather, Sid with his father.

Sybil had made identification not with her mother, of whom she was terrified and ashamed, but with the males in her family. Her father had let Sybil down but, except for the one instance when he and Hattie had been having intercourse, had not hit her or hurt her physically. Because she had to have someone, she had made her father the figure on whom she depended. The identification was the more natural because she looked like her father.

Her father was a builder and carpenter. She became a builder and carpenter by dissociating into a male personality. And that was the genesis of Sid, who had built the partition.

Grandpa Dorsett was aggressive and fanatical. He aroused Sybil's fear, anger, and hatred. Sybil had found the means of dealing with this grandfather and these emotions by dissociating into a male personality whose name was Mike. In Mike Sybil found an aggressor to deal with her grandfather's aggression. Sybil was terrified and ashamed of her grandfather. Mike reflected Sybil's feelings but at the same time made identification with the aggressor-- in fact, became the aggressor.

"How could Sybil get along with her grandfather?" Mike had asked the doctor in late May, 1957. "He was always there and always right. The only way to get along with him was either to lick him or join him. I joined him."

Sid and Mike emerged strong and nonneurotic. As far as the doctor had been able to determine, neither was subject to fear, anxiety, depression, or even undue sadness. Sid, however, more contemplative than Mike, was often subject to the intermingling of love, fear, and hate in his feelings toward his father and his father's father. Mike maintained a strong silence about his mother. Even though he talked freely of grandfather and father, of the "girls," as he called Vicky, the Peggys, Marcia, Vanessa, Mary, Ruthie, and the others who had not yet emerged in analysis, he was always reluctant to talk of Sybil herself.

Both Mike and Sid were capable of anger, but it was an anger that was more controlled, less furious than that of Peggy Lou, though it turned out to be linked with Peggy Lou. Mike and Sid, Dr. Wilbur discovered, were Peggy Lou's progeny, a part of a family tree unconnected with genetic inheritance, an offshoot of emotional functioning, of the defensive maneuvers to which the alternating selves owed their existence.

As the mastermind behind Mike and Sid, Peggy Lou delegated her feelings to them. By a curious phenomenon, Sybil had lost the emotions, attitudes, and acquisitions she bequeathed to the personalities into whom she had dissociated whereas Peggy Lou, in proliferating into subselves, among whom were Mike and Sid, lost nothing of what she delegated to them. That Mike was the product of Peggy Lou's wish became clear in a conversation between Dr. Wilbur and Vicky.

"Peggy Lou," Vicky said, "is angry about sex because of her mother's refusal to explain the facts of life. Sometimes Peggy Lou used to say that she was a boy and that her name was Mike. Whenever she thought she was a boy, she wore blue coveralls and a red sweater and did things with tools. She played like the boys and tried to do everything that boys do. But then she would get mad because she knew she wasn't. Even today it makes her mad to know she's a girl. It makes her simply furious because she wants children and wants to get married when she's old enough. She wants to be the man. She wants to be the man she marries when she's old enough."

Identified with Willard and Aubrey Dorsett, emotional descendants of Peggy Lou, Mike and Sid, these boys in a woman's body, were also mythological figures, the compensatory answer to the myth of woman's inferiority, particularly as enunciated in the benighted world of Willow Corners.

Although Mike and Sid epitomized the antifeminist view that women slink through life with secret masculine yearnings, a penis envy so strong that it becomes penis identification, and a woman's capacity for self-derogation so virulent as utterly to repudiate femininity, their feelings were rooted in the environmental influences of a milieu and were rejected by genetic, medical, and psychological evidence. These boys without penises were perhaps the objectification of a woman's rebellion not so much at being female as at the connotations of femaleness evoked by the retarded culture of Willow Corners. That rebellion, moreover, as Mike had made clear in saying, "I don't want to be a dirty girl like our mother," was a revulsion against the distortions about sex a mother had created. Loathing the femaleness that was her mother, a loathing intensified by her father's puritanism, Sybil extended that loathing to the femaleness that was self, to the body that her mother had violated.

"Now, in this body--your body, Mike,"

Dr. Wilbur had said, "there is a pair of ovaries, where the eggs are."

And Mike had replied, "I don't want them."

Mike and Sid were also autonomous beings, with emotions of their own. Mike's urgent need "to give a girl a baby" was an expression of that autonomy. But though both, denying that the body in which they lived was alien to their desires, thought and acted as free agents, it was a limited, uncertain freedom. Moreover, analysis threatened their freedom, for regarding the boys' presentation of themselves as a serious complication in a case already overloaded with complications and already following a halting course, Dr. Wilbur was determined to fuse Mike and Sid into the feminine whole they so resolutely rejected as soon as possible.

Mike's initial question, "How come?" had produced an answer rooted in multiple origins. Perhaps there was also a subtle answer in the fact that the unconscious, to which Mike and Sid, like the other alternating selves, belonged, doesn't draw the sexual distinctions that a stratified society imposes.

The uniqueness, which, before, was based on Sybil's having developed more alternating selves than had any other known multiple personality, was now founded as well on her being the only multiple personality to have crossed the borders of sexual difference to develop personalities of the opposite sex.

No known male multiple personality had developed female selves. Sybil Dorsett was the only known woman multiple personality whose entourage of alternating selves included males.

Since 1957, other multiple personalities who have developed selves of the opposite sex have been recorded.

After the appearance of Mike and Sid the analysis suddenly began to veer into the terrifying pathways of religious conflict. The serpent had caught up with the couch. "I want you to be free," Dr. Wilbur told Sybil in September, 1957. "Free not only of your mother and your ambivalent feelings about your father but also of the religious conflicts and distortions that divide you."

Sybil wanted to be free, but she was terrified that analysis would take her religion away. The terror was greatly intensified, moreover, by the realization that the help that she had always thought would come from God was now coming from Freud. Unready to accept this conclusion even though it was her own, she pondered whether both Freud and the Church could be right at the same time. The pondering in turn heightened the feeling of being simultaneously frantic, anxious, and trapped.

Wanting freedom from the religious distortions that hounded and divided her yet wanting to hold on to her fundamental beliefs, she realized that the problem was one of salvaging God while surrendering the appurtenances with which He had been enshrouded. This meant breaking free from an environmental bondage to a childhood in which religion was omnipresent. Armageddon was table talk, and the end of the world was a threatening reality. There had been menace, too, in grandfather Dorsett's prattle about the seven last plagues and the inevitable war with China and about how in the wake of the Catholics' assumption of power would come the doom of mankind, a doom that had also been prepared, her grandfather averred, by the perfidious, sacrilegious theory of evolution that Darwin had promulgated.

The crypt in the cathedral of Sybil's religious torment was occupied, too, by a variety of symbolic figures from the past, exerting in the present their throttling grip. One of these was no less a personage than Satan-- the serpent who had stalked through Sybil's childhood, a living, breathing presence. Fearing that he would creep in at night, she had also feared that nothing she could do would or could keep him from "getting her."

In the crypt of torment, too, was an angel with sword and fire, who, having driven Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden because they were "bad," threatened to drive Sybil out of her home because she, too, was "bad."

The more, therefore, that the analysis led Sybil to dip into the accretive religious heritage of an overstrict observance of rigid faith, the more hounded, divided she became. Yet while inwardly rebelling, she outwardly conformed to the letter of the orthodoxy.

The voice of that orthodoxy was heard in the consulting room that brisk September day. Sybil was seated on the couch, close to the doctor. The discussion moved from the need for freedom in the present to the lack of freedom imposed by the past.

"I understood the reasons for not smoking, not dancing, not going to birthday parties on Sabbath," Sybil explained. "But I rebelled inside. Then after a while I didn't rebel. Then I did again. And now I'm trying not to."

"Why," the doctor asked in dismay, "are you trying not to now?"

Sybil was silent.

"Okay," the doctor prodded. "Now what makes sense about not going to a birthday party on Sabbath?"

"Because it says in the Bible you should not do your own pleasure on the Sabbath day. You are supposed to think about God. Not do secular things." She had spoken unhesitatingly, but now she added defensively, "I don't want to talk about it."

"Doesn't the Bible say," the doctor reminded her, "on six days work and rest on the seventh? Isn't going to a party part of the seventh day's leisure of which the Bible talks?"

"You could go to a party on another day," Sybil replied nonresponsively. "But not on Sabbath because observance was from sundown to sundown. That's what God told us to do."

The doctor offered a correction: "That's what the prophets in the Bible said God told us to do. Let's not confuse the issue."

"God talked through them," Sybil replied with conviction.

"Perhaps," said the doctor.

"The Bible is written by the inspiration of God," Sybil affirmed. "It isn't just something somebody has written down."

"The prophets were human beings and we cannot be absolutely, positively, totally sure they got things exactly correct."

"God," Sybil replied, "would not permit them to make mistakes."

"Oh, He permits people to make mistakes!" There was a tinge of irony in the doctor's voice.

"Yes," Sybil conceded. Then her facial expression became taut as she added, "But not in something as important as His law, the guide for generations to come."