Word: sybillants
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...SYBIL by FLORA RHETA SCHREIBER 359 pages. Regnery...
...cast of characters in Sybil Dorset's brain makes the heroine of Three Faces of Eve seem only mildly neurotic. As early as the age of three, Sybil began subdividing her personality, "dissociating" into other, utterly distinct characters. All had their own names, distinct vocabularies, accents and mannerisms. Vicky was gracious, self-assured, an attractive blonde. Mary was plump, quiet, with long brown hair, etc. Two of Sybil's other selves were boys who found it painfully confusing to have their residence in a woman's body...
...years, Sybil remained oblivious of their existence; she knew only that she blacked out and suffered terrible amnesiac lapses. Once, in her fifth-grade classroom, she came back to herself in the midst of an arithmetic drill and thought she should be in the third grade...
...extent that multiple personalities are understood, it seems that Sybil's mind began creating alternative personages as a defense against her mother, who was a sadistic, child-battering schizophrenic. Brilliant (with an IQ of 170), yet mousy and depleted, Sybil finally embarked on psychoanalysis. Her doctor never quite knew which of her 16 personalities would turn up. After she underwent eleven years of analysis, treatments with sodium pentothal and hypnosis, the tribe of various selves merged into one coherent Sybil...
Author Schreiber, a former psychiatry editor of Science Digest, says that she met Sybil Dorset (a pseudonym) in 1962 through Sybil's psychoanalyst, Cornelia Wilbur. Her bestselling book is fascinating, but also troubling. As a kind of psychiatric New Journalism, it has a fictive, popularized vividness that undermIné medical credibility...