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It is rare indeed to find a national best seller that is also a book of enormous scholarly and professional interest to psychoanalysts. Such, however, is Sybil, Flora Rheta Schreiber's powerful biography of a multiple personality.
Sybil explicates the details of the genesis and exodus of a multiple personality, and is a lucid presentation of what actually took place in an eleven-year analysis which integrated sixteen autonomous selves into a whole person. As we follow the analysis we acquire new insight into what multiple personality actually is in terms of the dynamics of treatment.
Portraying convincingly and in a new context the omnipresence of childhood in adult experience and behavior, Sybil also provides us with a graphic elucidation of the unconscious mind and of acting out in its purest form. What the pseudonymous Sybil — a mere waking and depleted self, roughly corresponding to the conscious mind — repressed and was afraid to admit to awareness is acted out by her alternating, sometimes coexisting selves who dwell in her unconscious. But what is perhaps of greatest applicability for psychoanalysts is the way the multiplicity of defenses is revealed. That, in fact, is the real meaning of the patient's differentiation into other selves, all of whom are defenses that had to be resolved before she could recover.
Through hyberbole, the multiple selves in this case illustrate the general features of defense mechanisms in the analytic treatment of all patients. What these other selves act out as defense mechanisms — denial, projection, and isolation — we see in less extreme form in a great variety of cases. For do not some of our patients use defenses to avoid unpleasant, intolerable feelings, just as Sybil used them to defend herself against the savage abuses of a schizophrenic mother, a passive, unseeing father, and a hysterical dehumanizing fundamentalist faith? And just as the various selves in this case represented immaturity and regression, so too, in quite dif