The Impact of Sybil on a Patient with Multiple Personality

This report concerns the impact of Sybil on a young woman who possessed six personalities. These included a 4-year-old girl, a 90-year-old man, a deeply withdrawn and secretive intellectual, a cosmopolitan young lady, a studious introvert, and a very impulsive extraverted girl. As was also the case with Sybil, this patient's early developmental years were marked by emotional neglect and traumatically severe abuse by her deeply disturbed parents. In part, the personalities had come into being as a sealed-off community wherein the closeness of the selves to one another compensated for the disastrous rejection and deprivation which the patient faced in her real family.

The first two years of psychotherapy were spent in establishing a bond of trust and in becoming acquainted with the different personalities. The patient was extremely suicidal during this difficult early period, reacting to the slightest disturbances in the therapeutic relationship by threatening to kill herself or to run away to another country. On several occasions, she even staged suicide attempts before her therapist's eyes. At the same time, she made it plain how deeply she valued his commitment to her and she often stated that he had become the most important person in her world. It was in the context of the ending of this first phase of the relationship that Sybil entered into the therapeutic discussions. One day the patient telephoned and said she had just “come to” (the previous hours having been lost to memory) with a book lying open before her. She refused to say what book it was. When her therapist guessed Sybil she confirmed the fact and then hurriedly ended the conversation. It subsequently emerged that she had been secretly reading this book for several weeks, but had been unable to retain a coherent memory of the unfolding story. Each time she began to study it and encountered passages dealing with Sybil's shifting from one personality to another, the patient became afraid and would hersel