Observations placeholder

Sybil – Professor Flora Rheta Schreiber

‘Well’ the doctor continued quietly ‘I did tell Sybil that she is subject to fugue states during which she is unaware of what’s happening’

‘I know’ Vicky asserted, ‘but that’s very different from telling her that she’s not alone in her own body’.

‘I think it will reassure Sybil to know that she is functioning even though she doesn’t know it’.

‘She, Doctor?’ Vicky asked quizzically’ Isn’t the pronoun we?’ ……’We’re people you know. People in our own right’..........

........As has already become apparent, these other people within Sybil had different religious attitudes and different tastes in books. They also had different vocabularies, handwriting, speech patterns and different body images. Their reactions to sex were not the same. The fear of getting close to people, the result of Hattie Dorsett’s abuses, however, permeated the sexual attitude of all of them….

Incipient insidious jealousies often flared among the selves. Peggy Lou was furious that Vicky had an extensive knowledge of early American furniture. To get back at Vicky, Peggy Lou burned the midnight oil for countless hours, poring over books on this subject, memorising page after page, until she could proudly prattle as an expert on the subject. Vicky looked on with an amused, tolerant smile............

None of the selves was essentially more intelligent than any other, although there were marked differences in what had been studied, learned and absorbed. Although their ages fluctuated, each self had a prevailing age. Differences in the prevailing ages, in the quality of emotions, in the degree of activity and passivity, and of course in the traumas each of the selves defended accounted for vast differences in behaviour. So clearly marked were these differences that when the various selves telephoned Dr Wilbur she knew not only from the voice but also from the behaviour described who was on the line.