Sybil [Mass Market Paperback]

so all these positives aside, here are my criticisms: mainly they're with dr. wilbur. she sets herself up (or the author - dr. wilbur's buddy - sets her up) as PERFECT. well, i just don't buy it. many times she did things throughout sybil's analysis that i consider very suspect, and i notice that each time she does them she and/or the author make a quick decisive point of defending them as "necessary". such as: when the doctor decides she needs to "speed up" sybil's analysis early on by telling the sybil personality about the existence of the other personalities. it freaks sybil out (not entirely unexpectedly) and later the doctor "has to" go over to sybil's house and talk her down - after giving her a tranquilizer! so much for the doctor being against medication! and the doctor takes NO responsibility for having in large part caused the breakdown. i had a funny feeling the doctor betrayed sybil's other personalities' confidences to meet the doctor's own needs. perhaps she felt incompetent that the analysis was going "too slow." or perhaps she was just impatient and wanted to zap the treatment forward. or perhaps, HEAVEN FORBID, she had a twinge of sadistic motives: maybe she was pissed off at sybil for being so STUCK and wanted to break her down a little bit, attack her defenses head on. this i would not doubt! after all, dr. wilbur is human, and if i felt this 450 page book dragged at points, how the hell did dr. wilbur feel, sitting through over 2000 session hours and who knows how many extra hours!
other things the doctor did that were funky: becoming friends with sybil? what's up with that? talk about bad boundaries. of course, the doctor could easily defend her bad boundaries by just hiding behind being a wonderful, loving, caring, compassionate therapist - BUT I DON'T BUY IT ENTIRELY. i think dr. wilbur was trying to prove in some unconscious way to sybil (or to herself) that she, the doctor, was the real opposite of sybil's mom. perhaps the doctor was trying to defend against some of her own feelings of being LIKE sybil's mom. and by the way, sybil's exceedingly manipulative behavior at times might drive even the best of us to feel pissed off at her and want to get even at some level. but not dr. wilbur - oh no! - did you notice that the one feeling she never has toward sybil is ANGER - let alone HATRED?! i think the doctor couldn't handle those NASTY feelings within herself and simply defended herself against them by ACTING THEM OUT and then calling them therapeutically necessary.
other examples of this: getting sybil hooked on sodium pentathol to "help" her treatment. and what about that little line of getting sybil "shock therapy." yeah, right!

and by the way, i read on the internet after finishing the book about the outcome of sybil's life: she followed dr. wilbur down to lexington kentucky where the two lived nearby...happily ever after...as the best of friends. what's up with that? to me that's the sign of a therapist who could NOT LET GO OF HER PATIENT. talk about bad boundaries!

Dr. Cornelia Wilbur, who died in 1994 made psychiatric history with Sybil. Together they work to pierce the "Clock Incomprehensible," fugue states where Sybil cannot account for her whereabouts or actions. During their several years of hard work together, doctor and patient uncover a total of 16 separate and distinct personalities. Born in 1923, Sybil's various "selves" were "born" over 20-year time span, from 1926 to 1946. Vanessa is the only personality who is able to play the piano. Mike and Sid are her male personalities. Vicky is her cosmopolitan, cultured personality. Vicky and Vanessa appear to be the most appealing personalities and all 16 were created to cope with Sybil's psychotic mother.

Angry and dangerously mentally ill, the woman had a history of sexually abusing children. Sybil remembered seeing the mother naked and bouncing a naked neighbor's baby between her legs. The mother would also defecate on neighbor's lawns. She inserted objects into Sybil's body almost from the time Sybil was an infant; she forced the girl to drink laxatives and refused to let her release solid waste; she suspended her from the ceiling; she choked her; left her in a corn crib to smother; beat her with an array of sundry objects and permanently scarred her body with a button hook. Sybil's father appears to be singularly ineffectual; he dodges the mother and years later claims to have had no knowledge of the woman's extreme cruelty.

Sybil's acceptance of the personalities takes time as well. Dr. Wilbur uses hypnosis to fuse the personalities and after several hypnotherapy sessions, Sybil agrees to accept all of the personalities and their abilities be merged into one, herself. By 1965 Sybil is an "integrated" unit.

A gifted artist, several of Sybil's personalities drew and painted. The real Sybil died in 1998 and her profession was listed as "artist."