Most people have probably watched, or at the very least heard
of, the 1976 movie “Sybil.” In fact, if you have a few mood
swings, someone may actually refer to you as Sybil, the woman
with sixteen personalities. This extreme example of multiple
personality disorder has turned the real-life Shirley Mason into
a caricature. However, the story is based entirely on a factual
psychoanalysis of a patient, and, as a lover of both books and
psychology, I was easily enticed to read about a truth stranger
than fiction. The story is told over a period of 20 years, the
two decades in which Sybil Dorsett was treated by Dr. Cornelia
B. Wilbur. Surprisingly, Sybil doesn’t really seem that strange.
She is a quiet, rather nervous young woman, but she is also
compassionate and intelligent. In fact, Sybil had an IQ of 170.
Her only problem is the “spells” that she suffered from, times
during which she couldn’t remember anything. She would “wake up”
from one of these episodes, and she would have no idea where she
was or how she