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 22-24Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 22 Summary: “The Clock Comprehensible”
Though Sybil has heard her own diagnosis, by the end of 1957, she still has not really accepted it. She has refused to hear about or come closer to her other selves, and refuses to listen to them on tape. She still thinks of her other personalities as “losing time,” and after every episode she resolves not to let it happen again. When it happens again, she blames herself.
The turning point in this attitude is the episode in Philadelphia, with which the book opened. Chapter 22 retells that episode from Dr. Wilbur’s perspective, a clinical perspective.
On January 3, 1958, after two months of having no “episodes,” Sybil does not show up to her appointment with Dr. Wilbur. Several days later, Dr. Wilbur receives a letter from Peggy Ann dated January 1946, reverting to her sessions with Dr. Wilbur in Omaha, asking why the doctor has given up on her–a sign of serious confusion. Dr. Wilbur traces Sybil to the Broadwood hotel and asks the matron to check on her patient. Wilbur determines that Peggy Lou and Peggy Ann together have assumed control of Sybil’s body. The matron says Miss Dorsett is doing fine, but Dr. Wilbur realizes it is no longer safe to let Sybil walk around on her own in the world and no longer enough to proceed gently. Greater action, she decides, is called for.
When Sybil shows up at Dr. Wilbur’s office as herself several days later, she’s discouraged that she has to “start over” in her efforts to stop losing time. She is worried that she did terrible things while she was “gone,” and that she’ll never get well. Dr. Wilbur is determined to convince her to listen to the other voices on tape, believing this is the only way to help Sybil change her approach to her other selves, from self-recrimination and fear to acceptance and integration.
A month later, Peggy Lou and Peggy Ann appear in Dr. Wilbur’s office to tell her what they did in Philadelphia. When Sybil returns at the next appointment, Dr. Wilbur tells her that she is able to tell her what the Peggy’s had done in Philadelphia, and that Sybil would be relieved to hear it. Sybil is abjectly terrified, and asks, “Doctor, why are you torturing me?” (330). But Dr. Wilbur insists and Sybil finally agrees.
As soon as Dr. Wilbur plays the tape, Sybil screams that it’s her mother’s voice. She’s unnerved. She asks Dr. Wilbur to turn the tape off. Assured that it is not her mother’s voice, but Peggy Lou’s, Sybil becomes agitated when Peggy Lou refers to “our” zipper folder; “she thinks she has joint possession with me,” she worries (333).
Peggy Lou’s account restores several traumatic memories to Sybil that she hasn’t thought about in years: being blamed for the broken the pickle dish, her mother accusing her of breaking the medicine jar in the old drugstore. As Peggy Lou recounts what she did in Philadelphia–she takes herself to her favorite hotel, takes herself shopping for new pajamas, orders a big room service breakfast, takes herself to look at lithographs at the Academy of Fine Arts–Sybil experiences a sense of uncanniness, recollecting her discovery, in Room 1113, of the pajamas she didn’t buy, the gloves she didn’t own. She also experiences more complicated feelings, even a kind of jealousy that Peggy Lou can remember what she can’t, and that Peggy Lou can choose to take over or relinquish control whenever she wants to, while Sybil can’t control when she “loses time.” But Sybil also acknowledges that there is good in Peggy Lou, that she shares Sybil’s aesthetic feeling.
They then listen to Peggy Ann’s account. Though Peggy Ann shared the trip with Peggy Lou, for her, the year is 1946, and she is in Omaha. She insists that Dr. Wilbur went away, and longs to tell Dr. Wilbur about “the hands and the music and the boxes,” even when Dr. Wilbur insists that she hasn’t gone away, she’s right there, and she is Dr. Wilbur.
Chapter 23 Summary: “The Retreating White Coat”
Later that week, Dr. Wilbur confides in Vicky about not being able to get Sybil to actually accept any of her other selves. Vicky tells Dr. Wilbur that she is a complete personality, but that Sybil is not, and not to tell Sybil, as it’s part of Sybil’s “complex.” Vicky and Dr. Wilbur theorize that parts of Sybil’s self has been “siphoned off” into other personalities. Dr. Wilbur wants to know how far back the dissociations go, whether there was ever a time that Sybil was a “whole person.” Vicky offers to tell Dr. Wilbur about the first time she came.
In 1926, when Sybil was 3, her parents drove her to the hospital in Minnesota to diagnose her tonsillitis. The doctor couldn’t understand why Sybil, coming from a well-off family, was malnourished, and tried to explain to Hattie how to properly feed her child. The doctor was kind to Sybil, picking her up and hugging her every time he saw her. One day, Sybil noticed that the doctor’s cufflink was loose, and offered to fix it for him. He was surprised she was able to do his cufflink, and told her it was wonderful. When he came into her room one day and told her it was time to go home, she hugged him and asked, “Would you like to have a little girl?” At 3 years old, Sybil, knowing the doctor was pleased with her ability to do his cufflink, was sure that he would say he would like a little girl. Instead, he turned away without saying anything and walked out the door.
When Sybil realized she would get no help, Vicky came into being as a separate personality. So did Peggy Louisiana, the joined personality who would later split to become Peggy Lou and Peggy Ann.
Chapter 24 Summary: “Suicide”
Sybil’s roommate, Teddy, becomes familiar with Sybil’s personalities, and tells her what they do when they take possession of the body. Sybil records these actions in her diary, making insightful notes about them and yet she still resents them. She says to Dr. Wilbur that she can’t afford Peggy, who is constantly breaking glass that Sybil has to pay for, and that Vicky is a blabbermouth who airs all her secrets.
Sybil is most able to face the truth about herself in her sleep, when she is not a fragmented self, or conflicting selves, but simply a “total unconscious” (355). In sleep, Sybil relives the traumas that brought on her personalities. In one important dream recounted in this chapter, she’s sitting on a train that suddenly stops when it comes to a huge platform that her father is in the process of constructing. Suddenly finding herself in a warehouse, she sees a kitten trying to drag itself out and into the open space. She realizes it’s dying of starvation, and notices the decapitated body of the mother cat, with three more starving kittens not far off. Sybil decides to take the kittens home, but she can only do so after she’s disposed of the mother cat. She tries to fling the body parts into the river beside the warehouse, but they fall short. She blames herself for not throwing the parts with greater force, worrying that they will float back to shore. Turning her attention to the kittens, she is surprised to find there are three more. She puts all the kittens in a blanket-lined box, and sets off for home to find the person who would help. Before she does so, she wakes up.
To Sybil, the dream is threatening. The train represents the stalled work of analysis, the fact that in order to go further, she would have to go back to childhood. The first kitten is her waking self, the other clusters of kittens represent the multiple selves. In order to move forward, she has to rid herself of her mother.
One evening during this time, one of Sybil’s classmates, Henry, offers to go over notes for the classes Sybil missed with her. He walks Sybil home and they spend a pleasant two hours studying. At the end, Henry asks Sybil to be his date for a dance the following Wednesday. Panicked, Sybil refuses, telling him she values his friendship, and asking him not to press her. She can’t go to the dance because her religion doesn’t permit it. She can’t go to dinner with him because she knows she wouldn’t be able to tolerate his rejection if it came. She wants children, but can’t have them. Somewhere deep down, she thinks, she also desires Henry. But she knows she can’t see anyone until she is well.
At this point, Sybil feels the analysis has moved her backwards, towards childhood, while life passes her by. She is doubtful if she will ever be well. She feels she no longer wants to live this way. She turns towards the Hudson River. Vicky takes over, and sprints to a phone booth, calling Dr. Wilbur and telling her that Sybil almost threw herself into the river.
Chapters 22-24 Analysis
These chapters trace the course of Sybil’s analysis after the transformative episode in Philadelphia. The crushing disappointment Sybil feels at realizing she has “lost time” again finally helps Dr. Wilbur persuade Sybil to listen to her other selves on tape.
Listening to her other personalities on tape introduces new dimensions in her relationship to them. Whereas Sybil’s attitude to her other personalities before was abject fear and denial, other, complex emotions begin to develop as early as her first hearing Peggy Lou’s voice on tape. After Peggy Lou recounts how she fed the pigeons on her window sill every morning in Philadelphia, Sybil says, “Peggy Lou feeding the birds is like St. Francis of Assisi” (339). She is able to feel admiration, even sympathy, for her other personalities as she learns that she shares morals with them, and has an aesthetic appreciation of them.
However, her acknowledgement of them also introduces new, negative emotions. Sybil is jealous of the other personalities: she is jealous of their ability to consciously control their entrance and exit into what she thinks of as her body, resentful of their believing they have any claim to it. Sybil is also jealous of the other personalities’ relationships with her few close friends, and particularly with Dr. Wilbur.
The episode in Philadelphia finally forces Sybil to give up her framework of self-blame, the belief that she can promise herself not to lose any more time, and its inverse—that if she loses any time, it is because she was somehow wrong or bad. It thus represents a kind of climax in the analysis so far. However, in these chapters, Schreiber illustrates how the elimination of that form of resistance exposes Sybil to incredible levels of pain: now that she can no longer pretend that she is in control of the “lost time,” she realizes she must instead acknowledge the memories, and the needs and wants represented by the personalities who take over her body. She is forced to face the arc of analysis: that it must go backwards, and get worse, before it can go forward. This anxiety about her slow progress, and the demands analysis makes on her to go backwards, into childhood, not forwards, into the free adult life she wants, is symbolized in the stalled train she boards in her dream.
