Sybil~

Sybil (1976) is a movie based on the book of the same title that written by Flora Rheta Schreiber. The movie was directed by Daniel Petrie, starring with Sally Field and Joanne Woodward, who had once won the Academy Best Actress Award with the role she played in “The Three Faces of Eve”.

Sybil (Sally Field), a girl who has experienced traumatic childhood experience as the result of her mother constant abusive treatment. Although she kept repressing her psychological trauma and emotional pain all the time in her life but still, the repression has reached its limit and eventually “burst out” one day. The consequence of the “burst out” has shaped 13 different identities or personalities in Sybil.  Since then, her life has changed dramatically and she was no longer able to live in a life that only belongs to her until she met with Dr. Cornelia Wilbur, a psychiatrist who later diagnosed Sybil with Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID). Sybil would turn into different identities with the aim of serving different needs from the situations. For instances, in order to play the piano, she turned into a girl named Vanessa who are responsible for her musical abilities. Besides, she even turned into a sophisticated and charming girl who named Vicky. She was able to speak French fluently which Sybil could not do so. However, with the help from Dr. Wilbur, Sybil was eventually able to overcome her traumatic past experience, as well as integrating the other 13 different personality states.

The causes of Dissociative Identity Disorder are still unclear but it is believed that it often relates to the tendency of the escaping from the memories that contain unpleasant traumatic events (Barlow & Durand, 2009). Sybil tried her best to repress her traumatic events that she used to store in the deepest part of her memories. Nonetheless, when her repression abilities have breached its capabilities, she was then failed to control her own thoughts.  Hence, this would trigger the defensive mechanism to take in action by producing several different personality states in the purpose of protecting her from being harmed by the devastating thoughts. As we can see in the movie, Sybil has literally turned into several identities that used to different from her origin personality. There was one scene in the movie that portraying Sybil formulated a protection towards the fear of her abusive mother. When Dr. Wilbur asked her to recall anything about her mother, Sybil regressed into Ruthie, a baby state of her who holds an extremely fear of her mother. Sybil turned into a baby state and slept in one of the corners while sucking her thumb. This sort of regression behaviors can be viewed as a form of avoidance towards the unpleasant memories. Besides, Sybil has also shown the typical symptoms for a DID patient, such as depression which lead to attempted suicide, and major physical differences in which with the occurrence of several different personalities (Swartz, 2001).

Hypnosis has been used in the movie in order to treat Sybil’s DID. Without the prescription of any antidepressant drugs or medication treatment, Dr. Wilbur chose to give Sybil hypnosis as the only core treatment. I agree with the treatment that chosen by Dr. Wilbur, in terms of accuracy and the effectiveness. In my opinion, hypnosis is best applied in order to understand the patients’ past experiences and from the description given, the therapist and the patient itself will able to draw some insight thoughts of the disorder, as well as the reasons or factors behind. The goal of this psychotherapy is to help the patient to re-experience the unpleasant traumatic event and therefore search for the best coping ways (Barlow & Durand). According to Swartz, Hypnosis is the primary psychotherapy for DID treatment and the therapist will try to establish a contact with as many alters (various form of personalities) as possible in order to understand their roles and the story behind of the patient’s life. In the movie, Dr. Wilbur has certainly tried to communicate with Peggy, Vicky and Vanessa which were all Sybil’s alters. Throughout the discussion with the alters, Dr. Wilbur was able to gather sufficient information on Sybil’s past and was able to implement the best treatment for her.

Hattie Dorsett (Martine Bartlett), the mother of Sybil has freaked me out all the ways on how she abused young Sybil. Why on earth a mother could show such cruelty towards her won biological daughter? I understand that the abuse took place was due to her paranoid schizophrenia, but it seems just way too much for me. Perhaps we might not able to understand how young Sybil feels since we have not been through such experience before. However, we could still feel her pain! In my personal point of view, abusive parent is equivalent with the neglectful or permissive parent and will straight away being labeled as a failure in terms of being a parent.

As the conclusion, the movie has overall portrayed DID in an accurate way and was fit in perfectly according to DSM-IV. Besides, there are several lessons that we could learn from this movie. First of all, we should learn that psychological disorder can be inherited from the previous generation such as parent or grandparent. Therefore, we should be more alert if any of our family members are diagnosed with psychological disorders. Secondly, a humble advice specially dedicate for those who have planned to have children in the future. If you have high aggressive tendency or any form of psychological disorder, please make sure that you have considered properly for the sake of the child’s emotion and physical health.

References

Barlow, D.H. & Durand, V.M.  (2009).  Abnormal Psychology: An Integrative Approach (5^th ed.).  Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.

Swartz. A. (2001). Dissociative identity disorder. Retrieved from http://allpsych.com/journal/did.html