Sybil. Oh Sybil. Being in a one-way amnesic relationship with her multiple personalities shows to be exhausting and confusing for this traumatised women. This defence mechanism that she built up for herself was due to her childhood trauma of being abused by her schizophrenic mother which explains her fear of hook-like objects and wash clothes.
A lot of the times, the movie shows the multiple personalities's own struggle. Marcia is hopeless and wants to kill herself and Sybil. Vanessa is conflicted with her feelings for Richard. Peggy the frightened kid that craves for the warmth of a mother figure. Vicky that wants to help out Sybil but is afraid of telling due to the others. However, these personalities only emerge when Sybil is in distress and conflicted with her repressed memories.
Dr Wilbur is a psychiatrist that has an earlier interest on dissociative identity disorder (DID), how she strongly viewed Sybil's symptoms and diagnosed her with multiple personalities made me wonder if she could have had a different diagnosis if she wasn't so invested into rushing her biases. Even when she called her colleagues to discuss of the matter, she was already certain that it was multiple personalities. I believe that it would be more reliable and valid if Dr Wilbur were to consult another psychiatrist to further understand Sybil's symptoms and have a second opinion on her diagnosis. Other than that, even if it was multiple personalities, Dr Wilbur showed great interest and care into making sure that Sybil would understand her current state of conditions, although slight unethical. Dr Wilbur clearly is very invested in Sybil's condition. Often you can see that she is comfortable enough to bring Sybil into her own home. Is this normal for psychologists back then? Do they do sessions in an area where that is personal to the psychologist? Adding on to this, Dr Wilbur can be the confrontational type when the situation gets hot, verbally aggressive with Sybil and it makes me wonder if all the counselling skills we learned in second year was just for theory. Since I have no experience in these types of confrontations, I feel pressured to learn more when it comes to dealing with situations like when Sybil is in distress and panicking.
I find that stereotypes is also enforced in the movie. The father of Sybil thinks negatively of the mental health institutions, even so much to denying that the existence of the mother's mental health problems. If the father wasn't so fearful of the stereotypes, Sybil's whole condition would have been avoided. Another person that went with the norm is the family doctor. He knew that Sybil had been going through physical torture but he kept quiet. Why? Because maybe he thought it was a small town and he didn't want people to talk and meddle in someone else's family affairs.
Coming back to Sybil and her multiple personalities, it is very interesting to see how each personality emerge and share a part of Sybil through their own perspective. Whether or not these personalities are made up or if they are real, the actor that plays Sybil makes is very convincing. The idea of switching off one's own mind and being occupied by another in distressful times is a very interesting phenomenon. In my opinion, Peggy was the girl that she was during those times of childhood abuse and we see that she is often comforted by Dr Wilbur when Peggy is in distress. Vanessa is the more adult Sybil that she could have been if she hadn't gone through the ugly childhood nightmares. I believe that if Sybil wasn't so scared of everything she could have been Vanessa. Vicky is the scared teenager that seeks to please everyone, the other personalities, the guards at the gate, at one point even Dr Wilbur. While Marcia is the hopelessness within Sybil that just wants to end it all. However, I can only speculate this because at this point we observe that as Dr Wilbur further investigates on the personalities that it does tie to her past selves and memories.
What really got my interest was the fact that Sybil confessed to faking her multiple personalities. At that point of the movie, I'm already baffled. This is because she has not yet met the other personalities, yet when being questioned by Dr Wilbur she was able to mimic Vanessa's accent. How does she know Vanessa has an accent?!?! So is she telling the truth? What is really happening here?
I am still curious as to if dissociative identity disorder is an actual diagnosis for these symptoms. Because in some cultures, especially for Malays, if you have someone else in you that means you have the jin or whatever supernatural beings that you've upset... or inherited from family lineage. There are very few traditional families that would believe that it's not the works of Satan, because this culture has been passed down through generations of social learning and it is difficult to break that norm. Hopefully, now that there are other alternatives, people can consider that it's not the jin that's possessing them but their childhood trauma holding them back.
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