Sybil and Multiple Personality Disorder

MPD is a Rare Disorder Involving Different Subpersonalities

Aug 27, 2009 Jill Stefko

The Three Faces of Eve was the first book written a case of MPD. Sybil was written almost two decades later. Both brought an awareness of MPD to the public.

Sybil Dorsett had MPD, now termed Dissociative Identity Disorder or DID. The book is centered on psychotherapy and horrifying acts of child abuse. Flora Rheta Schreiber wrote about psychoanalyst Cornelia B. Wilbur and her client, Shirley Ardell Mason, whom she successfully treated for MPD.

Sybil the Book

She found herself standing in a Central Park lake and couldn’t remember how she got there. She had blackouts for most of her life and consulted psychiatrist Cornelia Wilbur. Sybil's bizarre behavior was evident. During some sessions, she behaved normally. Other times she was extremely shy, belligerent or spoke in a different voice. After many sessions of hypnosis, Wilbur was able to count more than sixteen subpersonalities, also called alters.

After months of therapy, Wilbur discovered the source of Sybil's problem: she had endured vicious abuse from her insane and strict religious mother who subjected the young girl to almost daily humiliations, most of which involved appalling sexual abuse under the guise of religious practices.

When psychiatrists Hervey Cleckley and Corbett Thigpen, wrote The Three Faces of Eve, they came to the same conclusion as Wilber. She viewed Sybil's personalities as protectors, fragments of her psyche that broke off to protect her during her abusive childhood. This eased the psychological pain that was too much for one personality to handle. In adulthood, she depended on them to help her in stressful times. Wilbur's solution was to introduce Sybil to each of her alters and integrate them into one personality.

What is Multiple Personality Disorder?

This psychiatric disorder is a rare syndrome in which two or more distinct personalities inhabit a single body. MPD sufferers are often are aware that something is amiss. They don’t realize that their body’s control is shared by different personalities. They think they’re suffering from a form of amnesia and/or black-out spells. Most have between eight to thirteen personalities.

In 1965, MPD was thought to be the rarest form of neurosis. In 1980, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, DSM III, published by the American Psychiatric Association listed the disorder as MPD. In 1994, the name for the psychiatric disorder was changed from MPD to DID in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual IV. The panel is comprised by psychiatrists in academia and those who have a practice. The academics argued that people could not have more than one personality.

Ninety-seven percent of people with multiple personalities have a history of severe childhood trauma, often involving atrocious psychological, physical, and sexual abuse. Another feature of MPD is that each of the alters has a different brain-wave pattern and a strong psychological separation from each other. All have their own names, ages, memories, voices and abilities. Often, they have their own handwriting styles, genders, ethnic backgrounds, talents and IQs. Biological changes happen in alters’ bodies when they change personalities. Many times, a medical condition, such as an allergy, possessed by one will disappear when another takes over. Frequently, one or several of an MPD’s personalities are children.

MPDs are predisposed to heal faster than normal people. For example, there are several cases on record of third-degree burns healing with remarkable quickness. Cornelia Wilbur is convinced that multiples don't age as fast as others.

Articles Related to Sybil

Readers who enjoyed this article may be interested in The Three Faces of Eve.

Sources:

• Abnormal Psychology, Ephraim Rosen & Ian Gregory, (W. B. Saunders Company, 1965)
• Minds in Many Pieces, Ralph Allison and Ted Schwartz, (Rawson Wade Publishers, Inc., 1980)
• Sybil, Flora Rheta Schreiber (Grand Central Publishing, 1989)
• The Three Faces of Eve, Corbett H. Thigpen and Hervey M. Cleckley, (Secker and Warbug, 1957)

The copyright of the article Sybil and Multiple Personality Disorder in Psychology is owned by Jill Stefko . Permission to republish Sybil and Multiple Personality Disorder in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.

MPD Shattered Personalities Like Glass Fragments