Sybil's Multiple Personality Disorder

The movie,Sybil, is about a young woman with a multiple personality disorder. Sybil is suffering from memories of a very traumatic childhood due to her having an extremely abusive mother and a non-attentive father. Sybil used the defense mechanisms of repression in order to repress and forget her childhood past.Repression allowed her to go on with her life. Although repression was able to help her temporarily, that is, she was able to graduate in college and to apply for graduate studies despite all the abuse. In the long run, however, these memories haunted Sybil and they begin to have an effect on her personality, in fact creating several different personalities that allowed Sybil to handle certain pressures or stresses.

One day Sybil

was in the hospital due to a cut on the palm of her hand. She had cut her hand because she had broken the window when she came back home from the park she started hitting the window and was rushed into the hospital. While at the hospital she met Dr.Wilbur; who offered Sybil free consultations. Sybil was not sure about having sessions with Dr. Wilbur and felt she needed to talk to her father regarding her meeting with the doctor, since she wouldn't need to pay for the consultations she needed to ask her dad to help her make the decision of whether or not she should do it. Sybil’s father was aware of the abuse that his wife was doing to his young daughter,however,he did nothing to stop it. He did not want to acknowledge because in his mind his “wife was always right”.Sybil met him for lunch and asked him for his support for her psychiatric care but he refused it .This refusal caused Sybil to act out aggressively toward him and she tried to stab him at the restaurant. Sybil then suddenly became Peggy and ran away which allowed Sybil to disassociate with the action and her father.