Sybil
Essay by review • December 14, 2010 • Research Paper • 4,155 Words (17 Pages) • 3,522 Views
SUMMARY
Sybil waited too long before leaving the lab. The door closed behind her. She was in the long dusky hall on the third floor of Columbia University's Havemeyer Hall. Then she was waiting at the elevator.
The key to her apartment was lying neatly in its compartment. There was inside her purse and then her billfold had contained $50 and some change when she left her apartment contained only $37.42. Now she had walked to the lab, bought nothing. After she got there she paid the missing cash to travel to this place and the key of her apartment no. is 1113. And then she went back in the hotel because of the key and the no. of hotel compartment 1113, 1105, 1107, 1109, 1111.
Sybil was twenty -two years old. Adrift in her feelings, she was living in despair with her parent. Wartime within because hers was not a war of nerves in the customary sense but a war of nervousness in a special sense for the nervous symptoms that had plagued her since childhood.
Sybil is confused how she got in the 5th grade when she knew she's just in the 3rd grade. She didn't remember anything or anyone except her grandmother died. But was she really don't know that her grandmother died for two years now so she ask everything to Danny Martin her neighborhood.
Vicky Antoinette Scharleau opposite of Sybil unafraid of her mother bright girl and came to Sybil in 1926-1934 of October from the time Sybil is three and a half years old until she was eleven.
Peggy Lou did the actual living on Sybil. She's the reason why she had lost all Sybil's school friends because she don't want to be close on everyone. She's not actually but she help Sybil by had earned the gratitude of Mr. & Mrs. Dorsett by taking her cousin Anita's obstreperous and two years old Ella off their hands the time her grandmother died.
Mary Lucinda Saunders Dorsett who had emerge during the first year of Peggy Lou's two year tenure and Sybil was ten at that time when she took that six grade set and one time she get back from school she went to the bathroom and change her clothes. She saw at her underwear this brownish red stuff and she's afraid that she's going to die because she had seen her grandmother who had had cancer of the cervix, bleed. But what Mary didn't know was that what had happened to her for the first time had already happened to Sybil for two successive months without Hattie knowing and without pain.
Sybil doesn't know that while Peggy Lou was there, Danny was jealous of Billy Denton because Peggy Lou didn't pay any attention to Danny, but she certainly did catch onto Billy. After Sybil came back Billy could never understand why she's acted as if she didn't know him.
In the months that followed Sybil found herself floating in and out of blankness. She became ingenious in improvisation, peerless in pretense, as she feigned knowledge of what she did not know. From herself she couldn't conceal the sensation that somehow she had lost something nor could she hide the feeling that increasingly she felt as if she belong to no one and to no place. Somehow it seemed that the older she got, the worse things became Sybil would remember that she had been somewhere or had done something as if she had dreamed it. She seemed to be walking beside herself watching and sometimes she couldn't tell the difference between her dreams and this dreamlike unreality. She mentioned this feeling of unreality to her parents, who decided to take her to Dr. Quinoness, the town doctor. Dr. Quinoness diagnosed Sybil's case as Syndenham's chorea, a form St. Vitus dance. Explaining that there was a psychological component, he advised that Sybil should see a psychiatrist but Willard and Hattie refused to keep the appointment.
The mother was dead. Apart from the patient herself, the father was clearly the only witness in whom the nearly three years of analysis could find verification. Willard sold all Sybil's properties and never gave her a half of the money. He remarried again with Frieda and of course she didn't like Sybil.
Willard is perfectionist in his work, a religious man. Aubrey Dorsett his father an churchgoer, and Hattie Anderson Dorsett was overly aggressive, constantly conspicuous and downright cruel. Both Willard and his brother Roger married their father, but they also remarried. Roger married Henrietta, she had two sons but she want to have a daughter and because of that she like Sybil. Willard's sister, Theresa didn't marry her father, but at the age of 40 she married a wealthy old man.
Sybil had admitted that she had been aware of sexual feelings toward her father when he talked to her about sex.
Dr. Wilbur ask Willard some question about his first wife on how she took care of Sybil and Dr. Wilbur ask him did he had confuse about the burns, fractured arms of Sybil and because Willard is always far from home, he didn't have a chance to confront his wife about the truth.
Mike and Sid the Sybil's two ante selves discuss their problem with Dr. Wilbur about the want to be a boy not a girl but because of their conditions they have the organ of a girl but they also have the body of the man.
Dr. Wilbur want Sybil to be free not only with her mother but also with her ambivalent feelings about her father and the religious conflicts and distortions that divides her.
They have a plan on how they help Sybil on her sick, Dr. Wilbur said that if they only connect to each other they will do the things that they want and also Sybil will be free.
Now Sybil know the answer to her question about how she had to that place. Dr. Wilbur revealed to her that she has many personalities that came to her body.
Vicky said to Dr. Wilbur that Sybil is not a whole person because parts of her have been siphoned off to the other selves. Sybil has a cat named Capri, she observed that if she change her personality Capri also change his attitude. Sybil have a dream about the train and the kittens.
Sybil saw the train as life, moving toward a destination but stopped by new work (analysis), which meant reversing its route (retracing childhood events) to become one. The various degrees of starvation among the kittens symbolized the years during which Sybil had tried to live and work normally only to discover that she had come to the end of the line (the train again) in maintaining the ruse of normality.
The kittens also symbolized Sybil. That they were plural rather than singular was a recognition that she was many. The first kitten, attempting to drag herself into the open spaces, was Sybil herself. The other kittens, discovered in separate
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