Sybil

= **// Sybil //** = = By Flora Rheta Schreiber =



Daughter to a schizophrenic abusive mother, Hattie, and a passive and mild-mannered father, Willard, Sybil Dorsett endures a life-long sentence of verbal and physical abuse. This eventually leads her to subconsciously create a total of sixteen different personalities to escape the years of torture and humiliation inflicted on her. Throughout her childhood, Hattie subjects Sybil to a series of terrible physical and emotional sights. To escape she unknowingly swaps places with her other personalities, therefore losing time and not knowing what happened. She’s in one place and then suddenly she is in another. She calls this feeling “lost time.” As a young adult, she starts seeing a therapist named Dr. Cornelia Wilbur. Throughout the book, Dr. Wilbur tries to treat Sybil’s Multiple Personality Disorder. On the way, Dr. Wilbur meets her personalities like Victoria Antoinette Scharleau, a mature French girl who keeps track of all the personalities, Peggy Lou Baldwin, an assertive girl with a very short temper who dislikes Sybil, Marcia Lynn Dorsett, an avid painter, and Mike Dorsett, one of her two male personalities who is a carpenter. This amazing true story is the struggle of dealing with these personalities and how they affect her thoughts, her relationships and ultimately her life. Throughout this book you are the audience to frustration, heartbreak and horror as you read about Sybil’s life and Dr. Wilbur’s attempts to cure her. //Sybil// is one of my favorite books of all time. At times, it made me gasp in horror and disgust and other times I smiled to myself and kept reading. What was very intriguing was seeing how the other personalities went about in their day-to-day lives. The pace in this book was new to me, but I loved it. It started out with a fast-paced excitement and mystery, and gradually slows to a calm tone that possesses you to keep reading. I recommend this book to anyone who aspires to be a psychologist, are interested in the human mind, or just wants an interesting read that will completely engross you.

**—Harrison Pyros**