75 pages • 2 hours read
Sybil
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Chapters 11-12Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 11 Summary: “The Search for the Center”
Wondering about the connections between the selves as the analysis progresses, Dr. Wilbur decides to ask Vicky in June 1955 whether she is related to Sybil. Vicky is reticent: she admits that she knows Sybil, and, when asked what they share, she says that she and the others sometimes do things together. She continues to insist, though, that they are people–not the same person.
When pressed further, Vicky evades by introducing Mary. Mary announces herself as the homemaker: she manages things around the apartment, and rarely leaves it. Mary speaks of the grandmother’s death in the present tense–she seems to continually live in the moment of her grandmother’s death. And though Mary feels that Sybil’s mother is not her own, she loves her father completely, and calls him “an almost perfect human being” (177).
In the next session, two new personalities, Marcia and Vanessa, appear and speak through Sybil simultaneously. Though the doctor wonders at first how she will tell them apart, she comes to see that they’re quite different. Both speak with English accents, and when asked what they like to do, they say that while they have their own likes, they enjoy things most when they do them together. What they like to do is travel, go to the theater, and read. But Vanessa is full of energy, and uses extravagant gestures, dramatizing everything. She has red hair, plays the piano, and is full of joie de vivre.
Introduced to these many selves, Dr. Wilbur wonders how she will figure out which personality is “the center”: is Sybil the true waking self, the “center,” or is it one of the others?
Chapter 12 Summary: “Silent Witnesses”
During the summer of 1955, the analysis continues to return to the moment of Sybil’s “awakening,” following Peggy Lou’s two-year tenure in 1934.
Coming to from her two-year fugue, Sybil is surprised when her mother tells her to go upstairs to sleep. She has always slept in her parent’s bedroom. She decides to go to the upstairs room and finds that there is a full-sized bed. This is the first time that Sybil does not have to face the nightly ordeal of witnessing the “primal scene”–a cataclysmic moment, in Freudian understanding of psychological development, when a child sees or hears their parents having intercourse, something Sybil experienced every night until she was nine.
During the day, her parents never kissed or touched in her presence; they were not at all affectionate, and they considered sex a wicked form of degradation. They did not answer any of Sybil’s childhood questions about sex, even when her mother was pregnant, and miscarried a little brother. All Hattie tells her daughter is that all men will hurt her, but that her father is not like other men, leading Sybil to believe her father does not have a penis.
Her different selves react differently to this nightly trauma. Peggy Lou believes her parents are whispering about her, and is angry at being excluded. Vicky watches what happens on the bed, unafraid. Vicky dismisses her scruples about looking because she would have heard anyway, and because she thought Hattie wanted Sybil to look, as Hattie would throw the sheets back, revealing the scene. Marcia fears for Hattie’s safety. Mary resents the denial of privacy. Vanessa hates the hypocrisy of her parents, parading a sexuality they deny by day.
A new self emerges in this thread of the analysis: Ruthie, who is only a baby, and who is the most enraged by the scene. Ruthie is jealous of the attention her father gives her mother during sex, and, in the middle of the night, tries to walk over and get between them. Her father, enraged, drags Sybil over his knees and spanks her hard.
Sybil, who lives in denial of this nightly trauma, becomes terrified of her father’s maleness. Willard, in turn becomes terrified of his daughter’s femininity. When Sybil was two and a half, he began insisting that she was “too big” to sit on his lap, or cut the hair on his chest, or put salve on his feet, too big for many of the habits that constituted the only affection in Sybil’s life.
Chapters 11-12 Analysis
Chapters 11 and 12 introduce readers for the first time to personalities beyond Peggy Lou and Vicky. As the analysis uncovers more personalities, deeper traumas emerge, and vice versa.
In Chapter 11, Schreiber shows us that the personalities are resistant to Dr. Wilbur’s attempt to persuade them that they are part of Sybil by logic. Vicky successfully evades the leading questions that are clearly meant to guide her towards the realization that if Vicky and Sybil share the same mother, then they are the same people. As we saw in Chapters 8-10, Vicky and Peggy Lou, and all the other personalities, have their own grounding rationalizations for the incomprehensible reality of their separateness and existence. As Dr. Wilbur deals with the proliferation of personalities, she comes to formulate a guiding question about how to proceed, and what kinds of results to expect: which personality is the center, and which are peripheral? In contrast to the logical, practical and familiar grounds with which Dr. Wilbur initially tries to convince Vicky that she is “really” Sybil, such a question radically destabilizes our usual understanding of what a self is by entertaining the idea that Sybil, who has seemed to be self-plagued by the illness of other personalities, is not the “true” self, and that the goal of treatment might not be to free Sybil from these others but to replace her with one of them.
Chapter 12 recounts the personalities produced by the trauma of the primal scene, and introduces an important theme: sexual repression. The contrast between her parents’ behavior by day and the displayed sex of the nighttime produces in Sybil a web of confused emotions about sex, each one distributed in a different personality: jealousy of her mother for her father’s attention; Oedipal jealousy centered on her attraction to her father; a feminine fear for her mother’s safety; a bitterness at the hypocrisy between the difference of day and night; anger at the sense that her mother is intentionally tormenting her; and shame, produced by her parents’ assertions that sexuality is wicked, disgusting, and natural curiosity. In this chapter, the contrast between Willard Dorsett’s flaunting of his nighttime sex life and shrinking from physical affection with his daughter sets up our understanding that for Sybil, sex is an impediment to love and affection, and even a weapon of domination.
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