Sybil (51 page)

"Now, Peggy," Dr. Wilbur asked, "you would say then that she wants to believe in God and the Commandments?"

"Well," Peggy Lou replied, "there are some things that Sybil thinks you will think are silly. The truth of the matter is that she's afraid to find out that she's the one who thinks it's silly. If she thought that, it could all collapse."

"So," the doctor asked, "is this why she is afraid to talk about religion?"

"And when things were bad, she used to ask God to help her, and she thought He did," Peggy Lou went on. "She believed it."

"Yes."

"Yet things were bad," Peggy Lou continued skeptically, "even while she was doing that. But she always thought there was an explanation. She had it all reasoned out. You kind of mixed it up for her, and she wants to straighten it out. She knows she can't get anywhere unless she does. All I can say is that she has to make up her mind about what she believes. I don't know what the others think. They're just standing there."

"Now, Peggy, will you and the others who can still stand aside from Sybil join me in making it possible for Sybil to go ahead and get things done?"

"Well, I should think so," Peggy Lou replied with intensity.

The new Peggy Lou was both objective about Sybil and on Sybil's side.

New York's sultry summer of 1960 brought unrelentingly high temperatures. While the nation girded itself for the Kennedy-Nixon campaign, the Dorsett case was reverberating with a private cataclysm.

Dr. Wilbur's brows were knitted in astonishment. Sybil had been hypnotized, Peggy Lou summoned. Expecting Peggy Lou's crisp "Hi," the doctor heard instead: "I say to myself Sybil."

The voice was not unlike Peggy Lou's, but the message confounded comprehension. "I say to myself Sybil"?

Fixing her gaze on her sleeping patient, the doctor said quietly, "But I called for Peggy Lou."

"You don't understand, Doctor," was the answer.

"I am Peggy Lou, and I heard you.

I am also Sybil. I'm Vicky, too."

A conglomerate? How come? Rapprochement had been achieved so far only among Sybil, Ruthie, and Vicky. Peggy Lou was one of the selves who still stood aside from Sybil. Yet without introduction and by her own volition Peggy Lou had moved into the tiny inner circle: "I am Peggy Lou, and I heard you. I am also Sybil. I'm Vicky, too."

The doctor called again for Peggy Lou. "We hear you," was the reply. "And your surprise does not surprise us. But you will become accustomed to us. This is what we have become."

"Vicky," the doctor called.

"We are Vicky."

The doctor called, "Sybil."

"We are Sybil."

Peggy Lou, Vicky, and Sybil had spoken with one voice.

"All right," the doctor then said, "it is time to wake up. When you do, you will feel relaxed. You will not try to solve any problem. The others who are not yet part of you have told me, without my asking, that they are with you and are going to help you. When you wake up, you will not feel lonely. You'll feel a little more sure of yourself, a little more confident. You will go about your business without fear."

The patient awoke.

"Sybil?" the doctor asked.

"Yes," was the reply.

"Just Sybil?" from the doctor. "Why do you say it that way?" Sybil asked. "Who else should there be? I'm really just me, and I'm not ready to hold hands with all those other people."

"How do you feel, dear?" the doctor asked. "I feel better."

"Are you a little less scared?" the doctor continued.

"I think so."

"Do you think you can do what you want to do today?"

"I'll try to make buttonholes this afternoon," Sybil replied.

"It's going to be a good day for all of you," Dr. Wilbur predicted.

"I'm really just me," Sybil insisted. "All of you are just you," the doctor replied prophetically.

The prophecy, however, was without any optimism as to when the integration would take place. What had happened in this session was spontaneous, spectacular, but the doctor could not be certain of the true significance. Peggy Lou had obviously joined sleeping Sybil, Vicky, and Ruthie, not through the assistance of hypnosis, but spontaneously. The doctor had not said, "Peggy Lou, I want you to meet Sybil." It was Peggy Lou herself who said, "I am Sybil and Vicky, too." Since the spontaneous merger had occurred in the hypnotic state, the joining was with sleeping Sybil, not waking Sybil. The doctor believed that the wisest course of action was to wait and see what would happen to this spontaneous integration.

Meantime, between July, 1960, and early January, 1962, analysis proceeded, traumas were resolved, and the massive residue from the past began to chip away. The two and a half years, however, were a period of watchful waiting for the major breakthrough that would make Sybil one person.

On a day in early January, 1962, as Sybil and Dr. Wilbur were driving along the West Side Highway on one of their now frequent out-of-the-office visits, Sybil was listless, gloomy. Usually she enjoyed the nonprofessional moments with the doctor, but on this overcast day depression shrouded enthusiasm.

"You're down," the doctor ventured, "because you're angry and you've turned your anger against yourself. It's probably your mother."

"That doesn't make me feel any better," Sybil replied defensively. Turning to the window, she made clear that the matter was closed.

Dr. Wilbur's hands were on the steering wheel; her eyes were focused on the traffic ahead, but her thoughts were on the impenetrable void that still clearly separated the conscious from the unconscious Sybil. Virtually all of the other selves, representing the unconscious, had vigorously declared their hatred of Hattie Dorsett, a hatred Sybil also had expressed in the dream about the mother cat. Neither the reactions of the other selves nor the behavior in the dream, however, had filtered into Sybil's conscious awareness.

Now, when the chasm between inner truth and outer awareness had become apparent, was the very moment, Dr. Wilbur decided, for a direct onslaught on this stranglehold suppressing Sybil's freedom to be one.

"Sybil," the doctor called, placing her hand on Sybil's shoulder.

"Yes?" Sybil replied hesitantly. "Would you mind," the doctor asked, "if I hypnotize you to get at the source of your depression?"

"Here?" Sybil looked at the doctor incredulously.

"Here," was the decisive reply. Against the background of honking horns and chugging cars, there then came the hypnotic chant. As consciousness faded and Sybil drifted off into sleep, she dug her fingernails into the car's upholstery and murmured, "When somebody is your mother, you're supposed to love her, honor her."

"Not when she doesn't earn your love or give you reason to honor her," said the doctor.

"I wanted to please her because she was my mother," Sybil pleaded in a low, strained voice. "But I never could. She said I was funny. I feel choked up, like crying, when I think of her. She tied me down. It hurt terribly. She was always doing things--hideous things." Sybil's voice quavered; her body shook.

"Sybil?" the doctor asked quietly.

"I got all mixed up," was the reply. "I never did understand. Put it way inside. A black strip with a round hole in it. I see it now."

Silence. A low moan of suffering. Dr. Wilbur held her breath. She knew that Sybil, like a surgeon pointing a knife at the crucial lesion, was poised on the threshold of traumatic revelation. Sybil's voice rose. "I told myself I loved mother and only pretended that I hated her. But it was no pretense." Sybil's voice broke. The crisis had passed. Sybil went on: "I really hated her--ever since I can remember."

Overpowering feelings of hatred flooded Sybil. "I hate her," she gasped. "Whenever she hurt me, I saw myself put my hands around her throat. Other ways, too. Stab her. Lots of times I wanted to stab her. Figures of her filled with nails. Never did it at home. Sometimes at school, sometimes at the hardware store. But I wanted to do it. I wanted to. When she died, I thought for a moment I had killed her. I wanted to for so long. I wanted to kill my mother."

At this point Dr. Wilbur could see that the paroxysm of hatred, drained from the unconscious, was invading the conscious. The internal motion catapulted Sybil forward. Dr. Wilbur caught her before she could hit the dashboard, but the doctor could not--and would not even if she could-- restrain the torrent of hatred. A crescendo of short, swift stabs: "I hate her. I hate that bitch. I want to kill my mother. Even if she is my mother. I want her dead! I hate her, do you hear? I HATE HER!"

Sybil's fists pummeled the dashboard. Turning inward, Sybil had reclaimed the anger she had denied since the time in St. Mary's hospital, when the original Sybil had ceased to be.

There was silence in the car, but from outside came the honking of horns, the sound of an auto careening because of a flat tire. Largely oblivious of outer things, Dr. Wilbur knew that the taproot of trauma that had triggered the original proliferation into multiple selves had been demolished. The doctor decided to wake Sybil up.

"I guess I didn't think much of my mother," was Sybil's first remark. Amazed that the patient had remembered, Dr. Wilbur countered: "On the contrary--you thought a great deal of her. And you wanted desperately to have her love you."

Smiling wryly, Sybil replied, "Wanting to kill your mother isn't very loving."

Even more startled than before at how much of what had been spoken under hypnosis had been remembered, the doctor knew that a milestone in the analysis had been reached. Not only had Sybil remembered what she had said under hypnosis, but she also had recalled and accepted as hers Mike's "killing" in effigy of Hattie Dorsett. These two developments, supplementing the fundamental admission of hatred of Hattie, so crucial to recovery, had represented vital moves toward integration.

Now, for the first time since she was three and a half years old, Sybil could get angry. The need for the selves who dealt with anger had therefore diminished, and those selves were now partially integrated with Sybil. Now, too, that Marcia's death wish for mother had become Sybil's wish, it was possible for Marcia and Sybil to move closer. But most remarkable of all was that once the capacity to get angry had been restored to Sybil, the pathways had been cleared for other emotions. The very act of expressing rage against Hattie Dorsett had transformed Sybil into a woman no longer bereft of emotions. Sybil had begun to move away from depletion, toward wholeness.

Hattie Dorsett, who had not really died until Sybil killed her with hatred on the West Side Highway, was no longer the major obstacle to Sybil's return to health.

The liberation of Sybil was almost immediate. It revealed itself dramatically several weeks later during a visit to her father in Detroit. She was seated on the sofa in the sunroom when Willard joined her. At first, simply reminiscent, she half expected him to take refuge behind Architectural Forum. When, instead, he seated himself beside her, eager to talk, apparently receptive to what she would say, for the first time she had no inhibitions about talking to him.

"When I was six and you had neuritis," she heard herself saying in a gush of powerful recollections soon after the conversation had begun, "you let me be close to you for the first time." There was an involuntary twitching in Willard's face as he replied softly, "I didn't realize that this was so."

"When we went to the farm that winter," she continued unrelentingly, "our closeness was intensified. But when we left the farm and you returned to work and I began school, we became strangers again." Flustered, defensive, Willard Dorsett replied "I gave you everything. A good home, good clothes, toys. Guitar lessons. I did these things because I cared."

"Dad." Sybil paused to weigh her words; then, swept along by the assertiveness that had so recently been returned to her, she took the plunge. "You gave me a guitar when I wanted a violin," Sybil said. "Don't you realize now that you were working in a vacuum? That you never bothered to communicate with me?"

Willard drew himself up with a sharp, abrupt movement. "I did sense," he said, "that the guitar lessons made you nervous, but I certainly didn't know why." He paused reflectively. "I see a lot of things differently now. I always wanted to do the right thing for you, but I didn't know how."

Very much aware of his proximity and stunned that he had not tried to make her feel guilty because she had been direct with him for the first time in her life, Sybil decided to give voice to what had been buried deepest.

"Dad," she said, "there are things that happened to me when I was very little ..." Willard Dorsett shut his eyes to stop the stream of his daughter's recollections, now flowing perilously close to the guilt that five years earlier in Dr. Wilbur's office he had accepted as his own. "Dad, are you all right?" Sybil asked anxiously.

Opening his eyes, he held up his hand in a gesture of entreaty, saying: "Sybil, say no more. I'm an old man now. Spare me because of my years if for no other reason."

"When I was very little, Dad," Sybil persisted despite the entreaty, "hideous things happened. You didn't stop them."

"The wheat crib. The buttonhook," Willard murmured. Then he looked directly at his daughter, imploring, "Forgive me."