Sybil (5 page)

She was so naive, so unworldly, so immature. Too, she worked against herself, using a lot of words without saying much.

Sybil herself wished earnestly that she could come back, but standing in the outer office, paying the receptionist, she knew that she couldn't make another appointment without first talking it over with her parents. Still, she felt that, if she continued to work with the doctor, she would get well.

Had she told the doctor too much? Sybil wondered as the elevator went swiftly down the six floors of the Medical Arts Building. Quickly she reassured herself that what she didn't dare tell had not been told. Then, walking out of the building into the glare of the August sun, she realized that she would never be able to tell Dr. Wilbur all that she should and could about herself. All that she, Sybil Isabel Dorsett, knew-- even then.

The Couch and the Serpent

Sybil made her second visit to Dr. Wilbur without incident. When the patient stepped out of the Medical Arts Building, however, she remembered that her mother was waiting in Brandeis department store on the adjacent block. Frustrated at being unable to accompany her daughter to the doctor's office, Hattie Dorsett had taken her as far as the elevators of the building in which the office was located.

"I'll wait for you in Brandeis," Hattie had said at the elevator door, making a promise of the statement, the old refrain of an enforced interdependency from which neither had been able, even if both had been willing --and certainly Hattie was not--to extricate herself. Now, as always, it was a strange case of "Wherever thou goest, I shall go."

Slowly, dutifully, Sybil walked into Brandeis department store, where, visible almost at once, were her mother's lean figure, proud carriage, white hair. At once, too, came her mother's "What did the doctor say about me?" Although it was a question, it had the ring of a demand.

"She didn't say anything," Sybil replied.

"Well, let's go," her mother said testily. "I'd like to stop at the library," Sybil remarked.

"Oh, all right," her mother agreed. "I want a book myself."

At the library on Harney Street Sybil and her mother went to different shelves and then met at the checkout desk. Sybil was holding Sidney Howard's The Silver Cord.

"What's that?" her mother asked. "It's a play," Sybil replied. "Dr. Wilbur suggested that I read it."

That evening, while Sybil prepared dinner and, later, did the dishes, her mother sat reading The Silver Cord. Her comment, when she finished, was: "I don't see why Dr. Wilbur asked you to read this. What has it got to do with you?"

Willard Dorsett, silent while his wife and daughter talked, was mulling a few questions of his own. He had reluctantly agreed to have Sybil enter treatment because ever since Sybil had been sent home from college, Willard had known that something had to be done. And although he was by no means certain that psychiatry was the answer, he was willing to give it a chance. But now, he wondered, was the decision correct?

The treatment, beginning on August 10, continued once a week throughout the summer and early fall of 1945. For all three Dorsetts it was a time of apprehension and watching.

Each time Sybil came home after seeing Dr. Wilbur her parents were waiting like vultures. "What did she say about us?" they asked separately and together. "And what else did she say?" Never did they ask, "How are you getting on?" or, "How did things go?" Nor was it ever what Sybil would have liked most of all: to have them say nothing. The treatment was painful enough in itself without this constant inquisition at home.

"You knock yourself down," the doctor told Sybil. "You don't think much of yourself. That's an uncomfortable feeling. So you project it on others and say, "They don't like me.""

Another theme was, "You're a genius and serious. Too serious. You need more social life."

Still another motif was: "When are you going to blow up?"

Dr. Wilbur advised: "Get away from home. Go to New York or Chicago, where you can meet people like yourself--people who are interested in art. Get away."

Sybil wished she could. The uneasiness she felt at home was being greatly intensified by the treatment.

The doctor's remark about Sybil's needing more social life, for instance, had really exasperated her mother.

"Well," her mother declared haughtily when Sybil told her about it, "what have I been saying all these years? What's wrong with my diagnosis? Why don't you spend all that money on letting me tell you what's wrong?"

Sybil's parents, dissecting what the doctor said, also criticized the doctor herself. She smoked, and no good woman did that--no good man, for that matter. She didn't go to any church, let alone a church of their fundamentalist faith. In short, they didn't trust the doctor, and they said that they didn't. The trouble was that having always had the upper hand with their daughter, they expected also to have it now. Her mother, who saw everything in terms of black and white, simply dismissed Dr. Wilbur as being wrong. Nobody, doctor or not, who did the things of which Hattie Dorsett disapproved, according to Hattie's precepts, could be right in anything.

Her mother's attitude toward Dr. Wilbur didn't surprise Sybil but her father's did. Sybil had thought him objective enough to be able to listen to reason, to be able to concede that Dr. Wilbur could be a good doctor even if he disapproved of her personally. Yet Sybil rapidly came to realize that her father could not overcome his resistance to everything Dr. Wilbur said or advised because her lifestyle was different from his. The doctor belonged to another world, and for Willard Dorsett, as for his wife, Dr. Wilbur would remain an outsider.

"Dr. Wilbur doesn't really care about you," Sybil's mother repeatedly warned. "She tells you one thing now. But when she gets you where she wants you, she'll tell you altogether different things. And remember, young lady, she'll turn on you if you tell her you don't love your own mother."

Sybil would assure her mother that she would never tell the doctor that because it wasn't true. "I do love you, Mother, I do," Sybil affirmed again and again.

The whole situation was awful all the time. Sybil desperately wanted to get well, and the scenes at home did not help at all. Yet there was no way out. If her talking led to a scene, so too did her silence. When Sybil did not talk, her parents would accuse her of being moody, and although they had upbraided her with this characteristic many times in the past, they now claimed that Dr. Wilbur was responsible for the moodiness. "She'll make you crazy," her mother warned, "and then they'll put you in an institution because that's the way doctors make their money."

In contrast, outsiders, people who knew she was seeing the doctor and people who didn't, talked of a marked improvement in Sybil. But when people said these things, her mother scoffed, and her father only partly listened. Sybil felt that he might have understood if his wife hadn't brainwashed him with her "She's better because she's growing up, and everybody gets more sense when they grow older and understand things better." Sybil was twenty-two, but her mother talked of that period of her life as a time not of maturity but of first growing up.

At least, the brainwashing had no effect upon Sybil herself. As the weekly one-hour sessions with the doctor in Omaha continued through September, Sybil became more and more convinced that Dr. Wilbur would help her to get well.

But she was still very puzzled by herself. Sybil had not told the doctor about what puzzled her--some terrible, nameless thing having to do with time and memory. There had been times, for instance, during the last summer and early autumn, when Sybil had gone to the doctor's office without, later, having any clear recollection of what had transpired. There were times when she remembered entering the elevator, but not the office; other times when she remembered coming into the office, but not leaving it. Those were the times when Sybil could not tell her parents what the doctor had said about them or about anything else. Sybil had not known whether she had even seen the doctor.

One time in particular stood out in memory. A paradox, a joke: remembering what you didn't remember.

Sybil heard herself saying, "It wasn't as bad as usual."

"How do you know?" the doctor asked.

"I would have been out in the hall or something by now," Sybil replied.

"Well," said the doctor, "you almost jumped out of the window. You jumped out of the chair and rushed to the window. I couldn't stop you."

Sybil didn't remember doing anything of the sort, but she hadn't argued the point. All her life people had said that she had done things she hadn't done. She let it go in Dr. Wilbur's office, as she always had.

"I wasn't really disturbed," the doctor explained. "You can't get out of these windows. It's because of the kind of glass. Unbreakable, you know."

Then Dr. Wilbur became more serious. "You had what looked like a little seizure," she said. "It wasn't epilepsy; it was a psychological seizure."

Psychological? The doctor was saying that Sybil was nervous. That was old--not new. What was new, however, was that the doctor didn't seem to blame her. In the past, when these things had happened, she had always blamed herself. Nobody else knew about them, but she had been certain that anybody who had known would have found her guilty of inexcusable behavior.

Nor did Dr. Wilbur seem to think that her condition was hopeless, as she herself had often feared. The doctor presented her with three choices for the immediate future: to teach at the junior high school for another year; to go back to college; or to undergo intensified treatment at the Bishop Clarkson Memorial Hospital, where the doctor and a colleague ran a psychiatric division.

Sybil chose the hospital. But when she told her parents, they were distressed, even terrified. To them hospitalization meant only one thing: their daughter was insane.

"This has nothing to do with insanity," Sybil tried to explain. "Dr. Wilbur told me it didn't."

"Then it has to do with the devil," her father replied ominously.

"Clarkson, Parkson," her mother rhymed. "Park son, park daughter."

Even though the hospital seemed the road to damnation, Willard Dorsett agreed to talk it over with Dr. Wilbur, choosing to meet her not at her office at the Medical Arts Building but at Clarkson.

Outside the hospital Hattie and Sybil sat in the car--the mother biting her fingernails, the daughter grinding her teeth. Inside, Dr. Wilbur managed to dispel Willard Dorsett's visions of his daughter's being locked in and restrained, of her undergoing a lobotomy, of her getting worse because of contact with other patients more disturbed than she, and of her getting well enough to go home only to relapse and return to the hospital. He had envisioned hospitalization as an endless, unremitting cycle of in and out, out and in.

Dispelled, too, was the deepest of all her father's fears: that his daughter would be given drugs. "No," Dr. Wilbur assured him, "we wouldn't do that."

Finally, then, although Willard Dorsett had an uneasy feeling about the psychiatric course on which his daughter had embarked, he did give his consent for her hospitalization at Clarkson.

Clarkson, as Dr. Wilbur saw it, was to be only a temporary measure. What Sybil needed ultimately, the doctor felt, was psychoanalysis. "You are the sort of person who should be psychoanalyzed," she told her patient. "I would like to do the job myself, but I'm not an analyst yet. In fact, I shall be leaving Omaha shortly to begin my analytic training. I suggest that after you leave Clarkson you go to Chicago to be analyzed."

The prospect thrilled Sybil. Chicago meant not only moving closer to the truth about herself but also getting away from home. Psychoanalysis, however, posed a problem for Willard and Hattie Dorsett. They had agreed to the psychiatric treatment, even to plans for hospitalization, but psychoanalysis was a different matter.

The couch and the serpent. The parents feared that the strange world of the psychoanalyst's couch might be antithetical to their most deeply held religious convictions, would probably exclude God from the picture. Their religion, to which Sybil's father had been born and which her mother, originally a Methodist, had embraced some years after her marriage, taught that each individual has the privilege of choosing between God and the devil, between God and the Lucifer of the prophecies, between God and the serpent of the Scriptures. The devil, the religion taught, could exert control. Everyone, the Dorsetts believed, has the privilege of choosing between God and the devil; God, assuming full responsibility for the actions of those who chose Him, could carry all who choose rightly to Paradise. Conversely, their religion posited, those who choose the devil will travel a different road.

Fearing to commit his daughter and, through her, himself, to the devil, Willard Dorsett could not give Sybil an answer when she pleaded with him to permit her to go to Chicago for psychoanalysis.

"I don't know," he told her. "I'll have to talk it over with Pastor Weber."

The pastor, decisive in most things, shared Willard Dorsett's doubts of the benefits of psychoanalysis. The two men were very close, and, impressed with Dorsett's talents as a builder-contractor, the pastor had engaged him to build churches for the denomination. As they talked in the half-built church on which Dorsett was working, the pastor was noncommittal. "I don't know, Brother Dorsett. I just don't know," he repeated several times.