Sybil

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Sybil Isabel Dorsett has not been herself for as long as she could remember, experiencing blackouts in which she could not recall anything until she “comes to” or regains consciousness. She is also perplexed by the social network she has developed without her knowledge, meeting people who say they know her and claim to be her friend even though she hadn’t really met them before. Dr. Cornelia Wilbur, a psychoanalyst, comes to her aid and discovers something psychologically perplexing as she sits with her patient during sessions. Sybil does not always come to these sessions as herself, or sometimes she does, before she suddenly has a momentarily blank expression and then claims to be Vicky, Peggy Ann, Peggy Lou, etc. The psychiatrist observes the differences in nuances, behaviors, and attitudes of her patient’s various selves, counting up to sixteen of them all living in one body through the extent of their decades-long battle for integration.

This novel was recommended to me by a classmate in high school so I decided to read it back then and remember being so fascinated by the theme of Multiple Personality Disorder that I even wrote a term paper about it. It did spark a phase in which I got obsessed with the topic. A quarter of a century later, way older and armed with new allegations from experts that the entire book was fabricated by the patient, the doctor, and the author so they could cash in on the story, I am reading it strictly as fiction and realize that it is still an enjoyable read as long as you dissociate it from its original intended purpose as a nonfiction narrative.

When the novel was written in the 70’s, it dealt with an illness that was yet to be studied intensively, so we can say that part of the fascination stems from that fact. A testament to the popularity of the premise is how two TV movies were actually made based on the material. Whether the trio of accused individuals, now all dead, were guilty of fabrication or not, what the novel has managed to accomplish despite all the controversy surrounding it was to open a conversation not just about multiple personality disorder, but about mental health as a whole, which many people used to just brush off as trivial back in the day.

In terms of storytelling style, the book just unfolds as a series of therapy sessions, later hypnosis, where one of sixteen selves would surface and gain control of the body at any given time, providing you with a clear picture of the main character’s traumas that they are defending her from. After all, it is understood that the development of multiple personalities serves as a defense mechanism that the subconscious employs so as to allow the person to act out on suppressed emotions that they are unable to express freely on their own.

The novel does end happily with Sybil getting well and all of her selves finally integrated. The plot is a little slow and mainly focuses on flashbacks since the intention here is to discover the root of the emergence of Sybil’s many selves, which the author could only accomplish if she looks into the past. There should be a trigger warning here because there are subplots of child sexual abuse. Needless to say, the environment the protagonist grew up in was not a very nurturing one, and this is pointed out as the cause of her multiple personality disorder.

The novel is never boring because you are introduced to a group of different characters even if you have just one protagonist. Sympathy is not hard to come by given Sybil’s circumstances. We can even go as far as to say that most of us also have tendencies for such an illness. Sometimes you tend to compartmentalize your traumatic life experiences by putting on a different personality to deal with them, even though many of us would not go to the lengths of actually breaking down totally and succumbing to the pressure. In the end, perhaps some people are just luckier than others.

To conclude, read this as fiction to enjoy it. If you turn out to be so invested in the story in the end, then you can always do some follow-up readings from critics of the novel through books such as Sybil Exposed and After Sybil, published decades later.