You'll experience the strangeness and fascination of one woman's rare affliction-and travel with her on her long, ultimately triumphant journey back to wholeness.Ī moving human narrative.- New York Review of BooksĪstonishing. You're about to meet Sybil-and the sixteen selves to whom she played host, both women and men, each with a different personality, speech pattern, and even personal appearance. It's the story of a survivor of terrifying childhood abuse, victim of sudden and mystifying blackouts, and the first case of multiple personality ever to be psychoanalyzed. As an Emmy Award-winning film starring Sally Field, it captured the home screens of an entire nation and has endured as the most electrifying TV movie ever made. It was the basis for the 1976 Emmy Award-winning TV movie starring Sally Field and Joanne Woodward.īook Synopsis More amazing than any work of fiction, yet true in every word, it swept to the top of the bestseller lists and riveted the consciousness of the world. Once she woke to find that someone had actually built a wall down the middle of her room during the night.About the Book Now in a tall Premium Edition, this perennial classic tells the harrowing true story of a woman possessed by multiple personalities.

Even more peculiarly, these personalities – 16 in all, female and male, and of different ages – knew about Sybil and about each other.Īll Sybil knew was that she would lose time, sometimes waking to find herself in an unfamiliar place, or dressed in a stranger’s clothes. Originally, the treatment was for social anxiety and memory loss, but during the course of their meetings, the psychoanalyst began to notice Sybil going into a sort of fugue state and other personalities emerging – personalities which, curiously, Sybil herself knew nothing about.

Sybil relates the treatment of Sybil Dorsett (not her real name) by a psychoanalyst. It’s a nastily fascinating book and gave me stabs and twinges of an unfamiliar feeling as I read it – my first experience, I think, of the queasiness suffered by the prurient. Attracted by its ghoulish cover – black with a bevy of scary faces – I picked up Sybil by Flora Rheta Schrieber when I was in my mid-teens and devoured it in one fascinated, bitter-tasting gulp.

Flora schreiber