75 pages • 2 hours read
Flora Rheta SchreiberSybil
Nonfiction | Biography | Adult | Published in 1973A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 1-3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary: “The Incomprehensible Clock”
Schreiber begins the narrative by taking us impressionistically into the experience of what it is like to be Sybil Isabel Dorsett during a moment of “dissociation”: the sudden crash of glass and an acrid smell in her chemistry class reminds Sybil Isabel Dorsett of two distant memories, referred to obliquely as “the broken glass in the drugstore,” and “the broken glass in the big dining room” (3). She rushes down the halls of Columbia University; she is waiting too long for an elevator.
Suddenly, Sybil is standing on a snowy, narrow street, confused by the fact that she isn’t holding the zipper folder she thought she had just been holding. The elevator is gone. She can’t figure out where she is, or how she could have gotten so far so quickly, and begins to panic as she recognizes she is not in New York.
Sybil wanders the streets, trying to think of a way out. There are no buses, no taxis. She thinks to find a phone booth, to call her roommate, Teddy Eleanor Reeves, and then remembers that Teddy is out of town, visiting her family. She thinks to call Dr. Wilbur, and wonders if she has missed her appointment: she doesn’t know how much time is passed. Stopping under a street light and rummaging through her purse, she is reassured by her social security card, her Blue Cross card, her driver’s license. She notices she only has $37.42 of the $50 she last remembers having in her wallet. Next to the keys to her apartment, she finds a heavy room key labeled room 1113. It’s mysteriousness causes her to panic, but then she realizes the key is to somewhere, some room that will provide shelter.
Finally, Sybil comes upon a gas station with a telephone directory that informs her she is in Philadelphia, a city she has visited before. Knowing where she is, the streets become familiar, and she becomes a little less panicked. A bus passes, and she frantically flags it down. She asks it to take her to the Broadwood Hotel, where she has stayed in Philadelphia before. She doesn’t know if the key belongs to the hotel. She is hesitant to enter the building, as she does not know whether to register with the front desk. After buying a newspaper that says it was January 7, 1958, almost five days to the hour since she had stood at the elevator at Columbia, she enters the building. The woman at the registration desk calls out to her and nods in recognition, and Sybil decides to head up to Room 1113.
There is no one in the room. She slumps down in a chair, and decides she’d better stay there. She orders split pea soup and a glass of milk. She is about to call Dr. Wilbur when she notices her zipper folder: they have her chemistry notes exactly as she left them. They make her feel even more self-recrimination than when she had realized, upon coming-to in the snow, that she had “lost time” (17). She finds a receipt for a pair of pajamas purchased at a department store she’s been to many times. The pajamas, crumpled as if they have just been worn, are bright and striped, not her style at all.
The pajamas, along with the familiarity with which the registration clerk and the room service waiter treat her, replace the terror of total ignorance with the terror of a “partial knowledge” of what happened, and Sybil decides she has to get back to New York while she is still herself.
Chapter 2 Summary: “Wartime Within”
As Sybil takes the train back to New York, she reflects on the circumstances that first brought her to Dr. Wilbur as a young woman.
In 1945, when Sybil was 22, the Midwestern teachers’ college where she had been majoring in art had sent Sybil home because of her “nervous” symptoms, which had plagued her since childhood. The authorities at the college had said she would not be able to return to school until she was deemed fit by a psychiatrist. Living at home with her parents, Willard and Hattie Dorsett, had only made her symptoms worse: her parents were controlling, overprotective, and unsympathetic.
Accompanying her mother on a trip to her doctor’s office, Sybil wished earnestly for her mother’s doctor to ask her how she is doing, so that she might ask for help. To her surprise, the doctor took her aside and, noticing that she looked thin and pale, asked her what was troubling her. Sybil admits to him that she suffers from “nervousness.” The doctor agrees to make her an appointment with a psychiatrist, and insists firmly to Sybil’s mother that she couldn’t go with Sybil, an insistence that shocks Sybil, because “it had been a fact of Sybil’s existence that her mother went with her everywhere, and she went with her mother” (23).
Sybil first meets Dr. Cornelia Wilbur on August 10, 1945. Sybil had been initially surprised that her mother’s doctor recommended a woman psychiatrist, and she is surprised to find that Dr. Wilbur is young, no more than ten years older than she is. The doctor seems kind, and is comforting to Sybil, but Sybil can only talk about how others feel about her illness. She freezes up when the doctor asks her how she feels. From the first visit, Sybil knows that she will be able to get well if she keeps working with the doctor. But she also knows she will have to ask the permission of her parents to keep seeing Dr. Wilbur.
Chapter 3 Summary: “The Couch and the Serpent”
Sybil’s parents permit her to continue treatment, but they are uneasy about it. Each time she returns home, her parents are “waiting like vultures” to ask “What did she say about us?” (28). They do not ask how Sybil feels about her treatment. They mistrust the doctor because she smokes, and because she doesn’t belong to their church, or any church.
Sybil is unable to tell Dr. Wilbur about what’s really troubling her: the “nameless thing having to do with time and memory” (30). But the doctor begins to make her feel differently about her dissociative episodes. Once, the doctor informs her that she tried to jump out of the window, an episode Sybil does not remember. She has been told many times in her life that she did things she didn’t do, and she lets it go. But the doctor calls this a “psychological seizure,” and doesn’t seem to blame her for the episode. The doctor does not believe her condition is hopeless, as Sybil has always feared.
Dr. Wilbur suggests that Sybil undergo intensified psychiatric treatment at a hospital, followed by psychoanalysis in Chicago with another doctor. Sybil’s parents are terrified that being sent to the hospital means their daughter is insane. They are even more resistant to psychoanalysis, afraid that it “exclude[s] God from the picture” (33).
After seeking advice from his pastor, Willard ultimately offers Sybil the chance to decide for herself. Sybil resolutely chooses to undergo analysis.
However, all her plans for treatment are undone when she falls sick with pneumonia. Unable to attend her weekly appointment with Dr. Wilbur, she asks her mother to call and let the doctor know that she’s ill. She listens to her mother tell Wilbur’s receptionist that Sybil is ill, and when she asks her mother if the doctor said anything about another appointment, her mother says no. When Sybil gets well and calls to make a new appointment, she is told that Dr. Wilbur has left Omaha permanently. Sybil is crushed. She can’t understand why the doctor left without a word.
Sybil convinces herself that the best course of action is to return to school. When she is about to finish college, her father calls her and summons her to Kansas City to care for her mother, who is dying of cancer of the spleen and has “insisted upon having no other nurse than Sybil” (39).
While Sybil is caring for her mother, her mother admits suddenly that she never made the call to Dr. Wilbur; rather, she had mimed it, knowing Sybil was listening. Sybil is shocked, but she allows no words or thoughts of anger towards her mother. Sybil no longer feels rejected by the doctor, and she finds from a directory of psychiatrists that Dr. Wilbur is now a psychoanalyst in New York. She makes it her goal to move to New York and resume analysis with Dr. Wilbur.
Sybil’s mother dies in 1948, and in the following years, Sybil lives with her father, teaches school, and works as an occupational therapist, moving around with her father. By 1954, she has finally saved enough money to get a master’s degree at Columbia University and move to New York. It takes her two months to get up the courage to call Dr. Wilbur, afraid both of being rejected by the doctor and of being treated by her.
The chapter ends back in the present moment, with Sybil returning to her apartment in New York from Philadelphia. Her emaciated cat’s greeting, she imagines, is an accusation: she abandoned her cat, her only real companion, the way she had been abandoned in the past by the people who “had claimed to love her” (44).
Chapters 1-3 Analysis
The first three chapters of Sybil introduce us to Sybil Dorsett’s mysterious condition, creating suspense around what it is, and providing exposition about how she came to be Dr. Wilbur’s patient.
The style of the first chapter is especially important: Schreiber begins the narrative by taking us impressionistically into the experience of what it is like to be Sybil Isabel Dorsett during a moment of “dissociation,” making us feel how traumatic the condition itself is, and how vulnerable a person really is when they are not in autonomous control over their own consciousness. Sybil’s loneliness, the isolation produced by being the only one to know what the mind-boggling experience of multiple personality is really like, is a central reality of Sybil’s life from the time of being a child. The fact that Schreiber chooses to locate the reader first entirely inside Sybil’s perspective establishes for the reader a feeling that she is the “waking” personality. While later Dr. Wilbur will wonder whether one of the other personalities is the truly “central” essence of the person legally named Sybil, the narrative Sybil does not truly allow the reader to share this doubt, because Sybil’s reality is the primary and establishing one.
After the first chapter, Schreiber switches from a third-person narrative perspective that cleaves closely to Sybil’s, in to a more-removed third-person, omniscient narrator, who has insight into multiple characters’ points of view. For example, in Chapter 3, Schreiber narrates the internal decision-making process Willard undergoes with his pastor in deciding whether to let Sybil attend therapy, an experience for which Sybil was clearly not present. This introduces the reader to Schreiber’s use of free indirect discourse, a mode of writing in which the voice of the narrator slips in and out of the internal voices or thoughts of her characters. While the style provides insight into Willard’s character and flows seamlessly into readable narrative, it also obscures how Schreiber came to know about Willard’s private considerations about Sybil’s treatment.
Finally, the first three chapters establish some of the major characteristics of Sybil’s abuse. Her parents are self-involved, obsessively focused on how Sybil’s illness and analysis reflects on them, never asking how she feels. Yet their abuse takes the form of domination, rather than neglect: Sybil is forced to constantly accompany and be accompanied by her mother. Though Sybil is an adult, Willard considers it his role to decide whether Sybil will receive psychiatric treatment. The effects of these disturbing modes of relationship are to deplete Sybil, to keep her locked in an extended childhood. Dr. Wilbur offers the first, hopeful glimmers of escape for Sybil: not only does she surprise Sybil by treating her as a person worth listening to, but, as suggested by the fact that Sybil is surprised to find the doctor can be a woman who is not much older than she, Dr. Wilbur also stands as a model that women can be people worth listening to, people with authority and power.
