Product Description

More amazing than any work of fiction, yet true in every word, it swept to the top of the bestseller lists and riveted the consciousness of the world. As an Emmy Award-winning film starring Sally Field, it captured the home screens of an entire nation and has endured as the most electrifying TV movie ever made. It's the story of a survivor of terrifying childhood abuse, victim of sudden and mystifying blackouts, and the first case of multiple personality ever to be psychoanalyzed.


You're about to meet Sybil-and the sixteen selves to whom she played host, both women and men, each with a different personality, speech pattern, and even personal appearance. You'll experience the strangeness and fascination of one woman's rare affliction-and travel with her on her long, ultimately triumphant journey back to wholeness.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #29516 in Books
• Published on: 2009-04-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• 512 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780446550123
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

Review
"Spellbinding!" (Time magazine )

"A moving human narrative." (New York Review of Books )

"Illuminating . . fascinating!" (Chicago Tribune )

"Astonishing . . . It forces you to look at yourself and the people around you in a new way." (Doris Lessing )

About the Author
Flora Rheta Schreiber was the psychiatry editor of Science Digest when she first heard about Sybil. She spent seven years writing this book. She is also the author of The Shoemaker. She died in 1988 in New York City of a heart attack.

Customer Reviews

READ IT ONCE .... YOU WILL REMEMBER IT ALWAYS
It is impossible to say a book on such a sensitive and horrific issue as child abuse is a great book to read; in fact, this book is probably one of the most difficult ones to read that you will ever come across. Having studied psychology, it is a known fact that Multiple Personality Disorder(MPD) is associated with child abuse. The personality "splits" when the human psyche can no longer cope with the pain of abuse.

Sybil is a story of such abuse at the hands of a mentally disturbed mother - sexual, physical and emotional abuse prevail. Sybil is a true story based on one of the most severe cases of MPD and child abuse in history. Over a span of twenty years, it reveals the various "personalities" living within one woman. How one could even survive such atrocities is beyond belief. The time period of this story ends in the 40's. Today, research continues on this subject and much has been learned since Sybil's case, but one can never have enough knowledge.

Sybil's personalities eventually merge and in 1998, the real Sybil died, finding, we hope, final peace and contentment. If you are interested in books on MPD, another true life story is, First Person Plural: My Life as a Multiple, by Cameron West, PH.D.

Spellbinding case study of multiple personality
In 1954, a thin, nervous young woman walked into the office of New York psychiatrist Cornelia Wilbur complaining of unusual "spells". She would inexplicably "lose time", fading out of consciousness and coming to again hours or even days later, often in an unfamiliar city and wearing clothing she never remembered buying. Believing it to be a case of hysteria, Dr. Wilbur embarks on what she thinks will be a routine course of treatment. Until, that is, her patient strode into the office one day with a confident, almost aristocratic air. "Sybil couldn't come," she says, "you can call me Vicky." Dr. Wilbur realized she was dealing with a victim of multiple personality disorder, then almost unheard of. For Dr. Wilbur and the young woman (whom the author gives the pseudonym of Sybil) it was the beginning of an emotionally exhausting eleven-year journey to make a fractured human being whole again.

In the course of her treatment, Sybil proved to have no less than sixteen different personalities (including two male alters, Mike and Sid). The sophisticated Vicky was the "record keeper" of the selves, holding back the memories too painful for Sybil and the others to know. Peggy Lou was the repository of Sybil's anger--defiant, belligerent, contemptuous of Sybil and terrified of breaking glass; Vanessa, a redhead with impressive musical talent. Some, like Ruthie, were barely more than toddlers mentally.

Vicky had good reason to keep the memories in check. Sybil had endured a childhood so horrible the word "nightmarish" doesn't do it justice. The child of a schizophrenic mother, (called "Hattie") and a passive, distant Fundamentalist father, Sybil never knew what awful or outlandish thing her mother was liable to do. An abused child before the term existed, Sybil was forced to endure physical and sexual torture that seems chilling even in our tabloid tell-all age. Rape and inexplicable, unnecessary forced enemas were a daily ritual until the age of six or seven--the angry, frightened Peggy Lou had to emerge to endure the unending agony.

Schreiber paints a vivid portrait of Sybil's family and the conservative town in which she grew up, and while we discover a clear history of schizophrenia on the maternal side of Sybil's family, Schreiber places most of the blame at the feet of Sybil's father Willard. He had known of his wife Hattie's schizophrenia from the time Sybil was six, when Hattie submerged into a mysterious catatonic state for an entire winter. Yet he made no attempt to hospitalize her, weakly protesting that he couldn't separate a mother and her child. The child's one escape from this hellish woman came in the form of her grandmother--when she died, Sybil's self disappeared. When she re-emerges, she finds herself in a fifth-grade classroom--almost two years later.

After years of harrowing, almost fatal crises, Sybil's selves are eventually reunited in 1965--when she is forty-two. For forty of those years, she was a living mosaic, a collection of parts. Hers was touted as a classic case of MPD and childhood abuse. Yet, not long after the death of the real Sybil in the early nineties, controversy arose over the accuracy of the account. Some professionals alleged that Sybil had not been a multiple personality at all, and may in fact have never been abused. Dr. Wilbur knew this, they maintain, as did the author--the "personalities" had supposedly been planted in Sybil's mind under hypnosis. The truth may never be known, but it is an undeniable fact such cases do occur, and as such, "Sybil" is a primer for anyone wanting to know the nature and origins of multiple personality.

E PLURIBUS UNUM - OUT OF MANY IS ONE
The case history of "Sybil" brought the mental malady of multiple personality disorder to the general public. Prior to the accounts of "Eve" (Chris Sizemore, the world's most famous person to have survived with this disorder) and "Sybil," many misperceptions about the illness were touted as fact. For example, many experts discounted the existence of multiple personality disorder and often saw it as a form of malingering.

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."