People Building

One Book, One Life, Many Personalities…

Reviewed by Lesley Glaister

I picked up ‘Sybil’ by Flora Rheta Schrieber when I was in my mid-teens and devoured it in one fascinated, bitter-tasting gulp.

‘Sybil’ relates the treatment of Sybil Dorsett (not her real name) by a psychoanalyst. Originally the treatment was for social anxiety and memory loss, but during the course of their meetings, the psychoanalyst began to notice Sybil going into a sort of fugue state and other personalities emerging – personalities which, curiously, Sybil herself knew nothing about. Even more peculiarly, these personalities – 16 in all, female and male, and of different ages – knew about Sybil and about each other. All Sybil knew was that she would lose time, sometimes waking to find herself in an unfamiliar place, or dressed in a stranger’s clothes. Once she woke to find that someone had actually built a wall down the middle of her room during the night.

Now diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder – or multiple personality disorder as it is more commonly known – Sybil and her alter egos entered an extended therapy, including hypnosis, during which the “alters” were encouraged to come out and tell their part of Sybil’s story. The cataclysmic fracture of her personality was traced back to a traumatic childhood incident involving her mother and a button hook (here the prurience really kicked in). The psychoanalyst was then able, via hypnosis, to convince the “alters” first that they were all the same age,

Read the rest of this article by the Independent.co.uk

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