Sybil

A major theme of Sybil is its status in the nonfiction genre, and Schreiber’s assertion that what she is presenting is fact. Sybil’s status as nonfiction is crucial to the initial conception of the book: Dr. Wilbur seeks out Flora because she believed it was not “sufficient[…]to present this history-making case in a medical journal, because in addition to great medical significance, the case had broad psychological and philosophical implications for the general public” (xiii).

From the beginning, Schreiber’s book must split the difference between two tasks: it hopes to reach a wide audience, to entertain, to serve as literature that speaks to philosophical subjects, while also being of a piece with a medical report. Correspondingly, in the Preface, Schreiber underlines Sybil’s facticity by emphasizing what she calls the “formal research” that had to be done for writing of the book:

The confidences I shared with Sybil and Dr. Wilbur and my direct contacts with the other selves had to be supplemented by a systematized approach to the case as a whole and to Sybil’s total life. I read widely in the medical literature about multiple personality, and I discussed the general aspects of the case with various psychiatrists in addition to Dr. Wilbur. I retraced the outer odyssey of Sybil’s life by talking with persons who had known her in her Midwestern home town (xv).

In Sybil, Schreiber paints Dr. Wilbur as being concerned with verification. When considering whether to bring Willard, Sybil’s father, into the analyst’s office, Schreiber writes that Dr. Wilbur, in thinking about the “evidence” of the child’s saga of being violated, reflected that:

all the assembled facts had come from just one source–Sybil and Sybil’s selves. Other testimony, Dr. Wilbur realized, was needed to substantiate the truth of the findings. The mother was dead. Apart from the patient herself, the father was clearly the only witness in whom nearly three years of analysis could find verification (244).

When Willard confesses in the office to remembering the unsettling incident of finding Sybil in the wheat crib, along with many unexplained injuries, Schreiber writes that he “corroborates” Sybil’s testimony.

Questions about the truth of Schreiber’s narrative have peppered the history of Sybil’s reception. In 1994, Herbert Spiegel, a psychotherapist and hypnotist who sometimes treated Sybil when Dr. Wilbur was out of town, told reporters that Sybil had said in therapy that her doctor wanted her to exhibit her other selves. In 1998, psychologist Robert Rieber accused Dr. Wilbur of fraudulently constructing multiple personality. In 2011, reporter Debbie Nathan argued in her book Sybil Exposed that the story of multiple personalities in Sybil was produced by Dr. Wilbur’s professional ambition, and Sybil’s need to give Dr. Wilbur, whom she was infatuated with and financially dependent on, what she wanted.

Without throwing away Sybil’s claim to truthfulness out of hand in light of subsequent research, it is important to attend to how Schreiber herself presents verification of all the events she describes, and how her narrative and writing style shape the reader’s sense of the truth.

In some ways, Schreiber is judicious in including facts that might cast doubt in the reader’s mind about both Sybil’s and Dr. Wilbur’s veracity. For example, Schreiber writes that Sybil’s relationship with her roommate, Teddy, began to fall apart when Teddy accused Dr. Wilbur of using Sybil for her own ends. Schreiber also includes the full text of a letter Sybil wrote to Dr. Wilbur late in analysis in which she proclaimed to have invented her multiple personalities. Then she goes on to present, without editorializing, the subsequent letter Sybil wrote, claiming that her first letter was written out of wishful thinking that her personalities had been made up.

Yet Schreiber’s literary choices mainly work to obscure and smooth over many doubts about veracity. Teddy’s assertion about Dr. Wilbur using Sybil for her own personal ends sounds baseless and a little random, an effect created largely because Dr. Wilbur is not painted as a full character. Schreiber provides very little information about what Dr. Wilbur’s personal concerns might be, other than that she cares for Sybil as a friend as well as a patient. Dr. Wilbur is always presented primarily as the doctor, the expert.

Schreiber’s narrative style obscures the reader’s ability to tell who is making what claims, and how they have been verified. Schreiber writes in an authoritative third person, and refers to herself only briefly as a separate character, “Flora,” at the end of the book. Such a style erases the thinking, questioning, fallible, and personally-involved “I,” who presented everything as being transparently factual. Schreiber’s use of free indirect discourse–third person narration that, without using quotations, slips in and out of speaking in the characters’ internal voices–obscures the source of much of the information she presents, making it difficult to tell who is making what claim.