Slowly about 16 personalities rise from within Sybil (including two male alters, Mike and Sid). Wilbur realizes that Sybil is a case of MPD (an almost unheard of disorder back then) and she would have to dig deeper in to the case. Wilbur takes her through a routine course of treatment until the day she meets “Vicky”- another personality inhabiting Sybil’s body. She speaks of finding herself in new cities and town, in clothes she never remembered buying. She speaks of losing time, fading in and out of consciousness over erratic time frames (sometimes hours, sometimes days). In 1954, New York psychiatrist Cornelia Wilbur has a new client –a thin, nervous young woman complaining of unusual back outs. As clichéd as it may sound, the pain and horrid incidents reflected in the book are sure to send a chill down your spine. It reveals the different personalities living within one woman (Sybil), in the course of (about) twenty years of her life that the book spans. It portrays sexual, physical and emotional abuse by the hands of a mentally disturbed mother. Sybil is said to be a true story based on one of the most severe cases of MPD and child abuse in history. The book is about split personalities (MPD- Multiple Personality Disorder) that is a by-product of child abuse essentially. What shocked me most was the ideation of the novel. The issue of child abuse, put in one of the most horrifying ways, makes this a difficult book to “just read” through. I don’t know where to begin from and what to write.
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