75 pages • 2-hour read
Sybil
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Chapters 28-30Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 28 Summary: “Journey to One”
In the late fall of 1959, Dr. Wilbur decides that Sybil’s progress is coming too slowly. Sybil finds she is unable to keep up with her coursework and drops out of school. Searching for ways to speed up the healing that do not rely on pentothal, Dr. Wilbur begins to look into hypnosis.
Though Sybil had strong objections to hypnosis when she first started analysis, she agrees to allow the treatment. Dr. Wilbur uses hypnosis to call up the various selves and try to move them forward in time, believing that integration of the various selves will be easier if they are all the same age.
Dr. Wilbur begins with 2-year-old Ruthie, Sybil’s youngest personality. Dr. Wilbur tells Ruthie that in ten minutes, she will be 3 years old. Wilbur asks if Ruthie would like to be three. Yes, Ruthie says; if she is 3, she can color. Dr. Wilbur tells Ruthie to pick a good day to “be” 3 years old; Ruthie picks a memory of a day she spent with her Aunt Fay. She then “becomes” 3 years old.
Dr. Wilbur repeats the process of aging for each of Sybil’s selves, discovering that many of them fear integration, as they perceive of it as a kind of nonexistence, something akin to death. Dr. Wilbur insists on reframing the problem not as disappearance of the selves but as a cooperation of the selves, with the selves helping each other do things and keeping each other company.
Chapter 29 Summary: “They Are Me, Too”
Once all the selves are Sybil’s age (36 years old), Dr. Wilbur asks Sybil if she can introduce her to the other selves under hypnosis. On April 22, 1960, Dr. Wilbur summons Ruthie, and Sybil says she can see her. This is the first time Sybil has a visual impression of any of her other selves. Dr. Wilbur tells Sybil that Ruthie belongs to her, and asks if she would like to have Ruthie with her from now on. Sybil acknowledges that she does.
Next, Sybil asks to meet Vicky. Sybil asks if Vicky is her friend. Dr. Wilbur summons Vicky and puts the question to her. Vicky replies that she would very much like to be friends. Sybil bursts into tears at the prospect of having a friend always with her. Then she tells Dr. Wilbur that she wants to rest, and meet the others another time.
However, over a month later, Sybil still does not want to meet the others. They appear in analysis to explain the setbacks: primarily, Sybil is afraid of confronting, and perhaps losing, her religious beliefs. Peggy Lou explains that Sybil is afraid that if she loses faith in the commandment “thou shalt not kill,” nothing will keep her from committing suicide.
In the summer of 1960, when Dr. Wilbur calls for Peggy Lou, she emerges to announce that she is Peggy Lou, but also she is Vicky and Sybil–a spontaneous integration. When she awakes, Sybil does not remember or acknowledge that Peggy Lou is now a part of her. Dr. Wilbur is unsure of the significance of the spontaneous merger and decides to wait and see how it develops.
Chapter 30 Summary: “Hate Heals”
One day, while on a personal outing, Dr. Wilbur notices that Sybil is listless and gloomy. Determined to make Sybil conscious of the subconscious hatred she has expressed for Hattie, Dr. Wilbur asks permission to hypnotize Sybil right there, in the car. Under hypnosis, Sybil says again and again that a person is supposed to love their mother. Dr. Wilbur assures her that it is not natural to love a mother who hurts you. Finally, Sybil says: “I told myself I loved mother and only pretended that I hated her. But it was no pretense[…]I really hated her–ever since I can remember” (421). She confesses to having had violent fantasies of killing Hattie. When she “awakes” from hypnosis, she remembers her hatred. Dr. Wilbur considers this a breakthrough in analysis: because Sybil is finally able to be angry, she has less need of the personalities that express her rage for her.
Several weeks later, the breakthrough allows Sybil to talk openly with her father for the first time about her childhood, while she is visiting him in Detroit. When she brings up the “hideous things” that happened to her, her father asks her not to make him listen. Sybil accuses anyway. When he asks her to forgive him, she seethes with rage, remembering all the years of lost time. Sybil is not able to forgive her father, but she agrees to forget it, at least in this moment.
During her visit, Willard promises Sybil that if anything happens to him, she will be taken care of financially. Three months later, in April of 1962, Willard’s wife, Frieda, writes to Dr. Wilbur to say that Willard is suffering from terminal cancer, and that neither the doctor nor Sybil seem to understand the seriousness of the disease. Two weeks later, Dr. Wilbur informs Sybil of her father’s death.
Sybil decides not to attend her father’s funeral. News arrives from Frieda that Willard left Sybil penniless. Without her father’s money, Sybil is barely able to get by, but the betrayal allows Sybil to finally accept the hatred she has always subconsciously felt for both her mother and her father.
The progress created by Sybil’s ability to feel anger at her parents is brought to a halt, however, when Mary plunges into an extreme depression, an internal conflict over religion that keeps Sybil in analysis from 1962 to 1965. Meanwhile, Mike and Sid put up a fervent revolt against integration: they continue to insist they are men, that “this is still a man’s world, and women don’t really have a chance” (435).
In 1964, Sybil feels well enough to hunt for her first full time job since moving to New York. She is now able to wake up and identify that she has very “Peggy feelings,” and to let her mind drift into discovering what it is Peggy wants. When she gives an outlet to those feelings, and lets Peggy do what she wants, she notices she feels calmer, happier.
This peace of mind allows Sybil to secure a job as a receptionist at a hotel. After a week of working there, she agrees to go out on a date with a coworker named Ramon Allegre.
Chapters 28-30 Analysis
Chapters 28-30 trace the progress that results after Sybil agrees to treatment with hypnosis. Through the progress in these chapters, Sybil’s case illustrates central psychological theories of how trauma works. For example, theorists of trauma write that for sufferers, traumatic events exist outside the realm of “normal” time; there is always the possibility for traumatic flashback, which means trauma is to some extent ever-present. That Sybil begins to get well once her personalities are aged up, liberated from living either “in” the moment or hobbled in their maturation by the moment of the trauma, seems to confirm such theories of trauma.
Similarly, theorists of trauma argue that giving testimony about the trauma to a listener helps bring the trauma back into the realm of the real world, because stories operate with beginnings, middles, and ends—in other words, according to the rules of narrative time. This rephrases and elaborates Dr. Wilbur’s Freudian belief that the process of surfacing, speaking, and acknowledging trauma produces healing, which Sybil’s case illustrates: it is when she finally speaks and thus is fully able to feel her hatred for her mother, and then, after his death, her father, that healing finally comes about.
These chapters also touch further on the theme of challenging normal conceptions of the self. A major final barrier to Sybil’s healing is the selves’ fear of wellness, their fear that integration represents a kind of death for them. Is a self, these fears implicitly ask, defined by its boundaries? Dr. Wilbur reframes their vision of integration: it is not competition, with one self-triumphant and absorbing, but a community, a state of working together, an end to the loneliness of separation. Instead of a self being that which is defined and clarified against others, it is something defined by its affinity with and sharing with others. Her reframing of the problem integration poses from the perspective of the supposedly secondary personalities suggests new ways of thinking about identity that echo feminist ideas about identity’s collective and communal nature.
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