Sybil (43 page)

"So far you have a perfect score," said Vicky.

"But," the doctor added, "I've wondered when it all began. There must have been a time before the first dissociation, a time when Sybil was a whole person."

"How did it happen?" Vicky mused. "Who was in existence? I was in a way. Would it help if I told you about the first time I came?"

"You don't mean the time in the sixth grade after Danny Martin left Sybil?" the doctor asked.

"That," Vicky explained, "was when I decided to enter the world as an active personality. It was not the first time I came."

"Tell me about the very first time," the doctor urged.

"I was in existence long before Sybil was in the sixth grade," Vicky explained. "We were three and a half when I first came."

Dr. Wilbur listened intently to Vicky's remarkable narrative:

"On a day in early September, 1926, we were driving over rutted roads with Sybil's parents. We were going from Willow Corners to Rochester, Minnesota. Minnesota was another state, and we were pretty excited about going there.

"The car pulled up in front of a red-brick building. Mr. Dorsett drove back to Willow Corners. Mrs. Dorsett took us into St. Mary's Hospital.

"The doctor made the diagnosis, follicular tonsillitis, but that wasn't all. He couldn't understand why we were malnourished--coming from a good family as we did. Oh, you should have seen Mrs. Dorsett's face when the doctor told her that she should feed her daughter better. But you and I know that it was the enemas and the laxatives after meals that caused the malnutrition.

"We liked it at St. Mary's. The doctor was tall and young. When he came into our room, he always picked us up, hugged us, and said, "How's my big girl today?"' He looked at our throat and then let us look at his.

"The doctor laughed, and we laughed too. We liked being with him.

"As he held us high in the air, we could see that one of his cufflinks was loose. We told him that we would fix it.

"Do you think you can?" he asked. "I know I can," we replied promptly, "because I put my Daddy's in for him every Sabbath."

"All right, honey," the doctor said as he put us back into a sitting position.

Nobody had ever called us honey before. "Then we fixed the cufflink and turned it through that little hole in his shirt sleeve."

"That's wonderful," the doctor said. "When we left our room, we hoped he would come back soon. But when he did come, he didn't look at our throat. He didn't pick us up. He just smiled and said, "I have good news for you. You're going home."

"Our arms went around his neck. We looked into his face and asked, "Would you like to have a little girl?"'

"He had liked the way we fixed his cufflink. We were sure he would like to have us do it all the time. We waited for him to say, "Yes, I want a little girl."

"He didn't say that. He didn't say anything. He just turned away from us, and we saw that white coat moving toward the door. The white coat faded into nothingness. Again rescue was gone."

Vicky paused. Fascinated by the narrative, Dr. Wilbur said nothing. Vicky explained, "When we came to the hospital, I was part of Sybil. But at the moment that the doctor left us, I was no longer part of her. As that white coat moved through that door, we were no longer one. I became myself."

Dr. Wilbur was not surprised that the first dissociation had occurred this early. There had, in fact, been a good deal of evidence to substantiate this possibility. Earlier the analysis had revealed that during a visit to the Anderson family home in Elderville when Sybil was four, she had become Marcia. Long before talking of the St. Mary's episode, Vicky had said, "Sybil was just a little girl when I came." And in reconstructing the powerful experience of the lost two years between the third and the fifth grades Sybil had made clear that this had not been the first dissociation.

That same week Dr. Wilbur talked to Sybil about the events Vicky had reported. At first Sybil had no recollection of them. Then suddenly she recalled: "I was sitting on the rug in the sunroom at home in Willow Corners. I was fourteen. Something about that was connected with what you just told me." After a pause she added, "All of a sudden, as I was sitting there, I began thinking of the doctor's white coat moving away from me. I realized that I did not remember anything after that. There was nothing. I remembered my parents' taking me to the hospital on a beautiful September day; I couldn't remember the drive from the hospital back to Willow Corners. The next thing I remembered after the doctor left me was being in the sunroom and wearing a dress I had never seen before. When I asked my mother where the dress came from, she replied, "You know perfectly well Mrs. Engle made it." But I didn't.

"From then on whenever I was afraid and there was no one to help me, I saw that white coat moving away from me."

Later during the same hour Peggy Lou talked about being afraid of white because of the "white coat that left us helpless."

"Us?" Dr. Wilbur asked. "Were you at St. Mary's?"

"I went there as part of Sybil," Peggy Lou replied. "But when that white coat left us, I became myself. Well, not exactly. Peggy Ann and I were one then. We were called Peggy Louisiana."

When Vicky returned a few days later, the analysis again revolved around the first dissociation. Vicky told Dr. Wilbur: "Sybil left the hospital in Rochester as the other Sybil-- frightened, timid, withdrawn."

Smiling, Vicky added, "The Peggys and I remember leaving St. Mary's and coming home, but Sybil doesn't remember."

"Yes, she told me," the doctor replied quietly.

Although she who was still called Sybil ostensibly rode with her parents from Rochester to Willow Corners, in the car were two other children. Vicky and Peggy Louisiana became autonomous, alternating selves, and from that moment forward there was much that Sybil didn't see, much that was concealed from her and would remain concealed for thirty-nine years.

When the doctor denied her hope of rescue from without, the rescue came from within. The original child, Sybil, ceased to be.

These newcomers to existence contained between them everything that the new Sybil had lost. In Peggy Louisiana there had been invested all of the original child's assertiveness and hostility, all of her rage. To the one who would later be called Vicky had gone most of the original child's poise, confidence, capacity to negotiate the world. In Vicky, too, was centered the continuity of memory and of seeing life whole.

Observing, recording, remembering, Vicky was nevertheless, at this stage, quiescent. It was Peggy Louisiana whom Hattie and Willard brought home that September day.

The original Sybil had been an active child, able at two to swing on a door, but as a result of oppression she had become shy and retiring. Returning from Rochester, Peggy took over the active behavior that had been subdued and lost in the original Sybil. Peggy walked on fences, played "follow the leader," and showed herself to be a daredevil. "The hospital did her a lot of good," Hattie told Willard.

"She's better."

Dr. Wilbur could see that the larger part of what the original Sybil had been--much of her libido and many of her acquisitions and modes of behavior--had been relegated to other selves, created in this first dissociation. What remained as Sybil was a depleted personality, whose initial fear of her mother had expanded to include not only maternal figures but everybody. Driven by fear, this depleted personality had resolved never again to take the risk of involving herself with human beings. A mere waking self, drained of feeling, it was a self bereft, but it was also a self protected by powerful built-in defenses against the very forces that had divided her. Not wanting to go home from the hospital, the original child did not go home. She sent two internal defenders as her deputies to represent her.

For Sybil, the waking self, this was the beginning of time unremembered, of time stolen by those who came to defend her.

The original defenders, Peggy and Vicky, later produced progeny of their own. It was a very special family "tree," a genealogy of psychological functioning, emotional inheritance. By 1935, she who was known simply as Sybil and was then twelve had become all of the fourteen selves who had so far presented themselves in analysis.

Dr. Wilbur had established that Vicky's line consisted of Marcia, who had appeared in 1927, Mary (1934), Vanessa (1935), and Sybil Ann, the precise date of whose arrival is not known; that Peggy's line consisted of Peggy Ann, into whom the original Peggy had developed; Peggy Lou, who appeared in 1926; Sid, who arrived early in 1928; and Mike, who made his entrance later that same year.

It had also become clear to the doctor that whereas Sybil lost everything with which Vicky and the original Peggy were endowed, Vicky and Peggy lost nothing that their descendants inherited. Vicky and Peggy retained as their own the emotions, characteristics, acquisitions, and modes of behavior that had infused the lives of their progeny.

Ruthie, Helen, Marjorie, and Clara, the doctor noted, were descended from neither Vicky nor Peggy nor directly from the original Sybil. These four were without antecedents.

The following day, Dr. Wilbur, alone in her study, thought of the night some four years earlier when she had first gone to the Academy of Medicine library to read about multiple personality. Since that night she had been searching for the time of the first dissociation and for the original trauma that had caused Sybil to proliferate into multiple selves. Now Dr. Wilbur knew that the first dissociation had taken place in St. Mary's Hospital when Sybil was three and a half, and that it had been spawned not by one trauma but by a succession of traumas induced by Hattie Dorsett, the taproot, aided and abetted by the powerful associated root of Willard Dorsett's failure to provide rescue. The trauma had been reinforced by Sybil's entrapment by religion, particularly as projected by a religiously hysterical grandfather.

Hysterics flourish in a naive social milieu and even better in an environment bedecked with the fire and brimstone of a fundamentalist faith.

It was now also possible for Dr. Wilbur to associate with these traumatizing events of childhood the pervading fears that Sybil and Peggy Lou had expressed in the early days of the analysis. The fear of getting close to people, evident in the first days of the analysis, was an extension of the fear of getting close to her mother. The hands the patient feared were her mother's hands, instruments of torture. The fear of music had many themes: the tying of Sybil to the piano leg while Hattie played; Hattie's obsessive virtuosity that denied Sybil's presence; Hattie's unrelenting harping when Sybil herself tried to play;

Hattie's and Willard's frustration by music; Willard's use of the guitar as an ersatz solution to Sybil's psychological problem, combined with his insistence that she study the guitar instead of the violin.

Also clearly evident was the origin of the seething rage, repressed in Sybil but unbridled in Peggy Lou. Clear, too, was why Vicky, inventing a loving mother of her own by extending the loving mother of Sybil's pretend world, was a neurotic solution to the childhood dilemma. Falling into place as well was the fact that the feeling of entrapment, manifested from the very beginning of the analysis, was the heritage from the past: the reliving of the capture, control, imprisonment, and torture syndrome and the feeling of entrapment by religion.

What was also clear was that the fourteen alternating selves, who had started out constructively but who had become highly destructive to one another and to Sybil, would have to be integrated before the original child could be restored.

The doctor reached for one of the essays Sybil had written for her, a procedure prescribed as part of the therapy.

Written immediately after the Philadelphia episode, it revealed a confusion and despair that made the promised land of integration, which had so recently beckoned, recede.

The letter read:

I have a few things to say, and I'm not sure I can say them when I get down there, and anyway I want to get them off my chest first so I won't talk all hour when what I really need is your help and some understanding on MY part. I NEED to know what I am fighting. Philadelphia really hit hard. I had thought for the first time with no doubts that the losing time part was gone forever. I'd had doubts before because I'd go a while without and then it would happen again, but after two whole months without losing out, well--his And you were disappointed in me. Now I'm as tightly bound as I've ever been. The tension is so great and the despair. Oh well, I just can't find any peace, that's all. But nothing matters as much as the "why" of it. You have said a number of things that have circled my brain again and again. You have talked of my fears. The fear CAN'T be any worse than the feelings I had the last few days. I feel stuck. I have read in Fenichel and in Alexander's books that this causes that symptom, and I have come to see quite a lot. But never do I read WHAT TO DO ABOUT X. I am ready to fight or accept or whatever, but how do I make the inside me accept what the outside me hears? I have gathered from what you have said that this is what I need to do. I've tried and tried, but I can't seem to. All I do is panic. It is just these awful symptoms. I've had to lie down twice since I started writing this. I know it is only tension using up my energy, but knowing it doesn't seem to change it. The only thing that really helps is when you and I work out some problem or memory. Then I get some relief for a while before something else starts in again. I don't know what to do. I sometimes think what's the use? There's no way out. Integration? That's a great mirage. The other sense of the word is easier to achieve than this. The real trouble is that I have never been able to convince you of my inadequacies and worthlessness. Will we even be able to talk about it? When will I get back to your office as "me"? When will I make decisions as "me"? There is NO WAY OUT. Was there?