Sybil
.... In order to deal with the stress of the memory Sybil displaced herself and allowed one of her multiple personalities to take over the situation. Sybil also used displacement to deal with the stress of childhood. Displacement is the process of concentrating your anxieties or stress on a person or thing that is less intimidating. In one example, when Sybil’s cat has kittens she steals them away from their mother and beheads the mother cat. Due to Sybil’s severely abusive experiences with her mother she perceives all mothers as being bad, even if they are a cat. Sybil is able to displace all of the hate that she feels for her mother to the mother cat and kills her to save the kittens from the torment that she endured through her mother. Sybil’s psychologist, Dr. Wilbur, was able to discover Sybil’s displacement through the use of free-association. Free-association is a common clinical process allowing the patient to talk freely in order to persuade unconscious thoughts and dreams to be revealed. Sybil was frequently allowed to freely associate her thoughts in a clinical setting. This process allowed her to reveal what was troubling her at the time without feeling pressured by the clinician to disclose her troubles. This process was a focal starting point in uncovering the causes of Sybil’s anxieties on a conscious and unconscious level. Sybil’s disorder was treated using the psychoanalytical approach. The psychoanalytical approach is an theory which was developed by the late Sigmund Freud. This theory states that the mind is divided into two main parts the conscious and the unconscious. Whenever something occurs that is potentially destructive to our psychological well-being it is tucked away into our unconscious mind to protect us. Unfortunately, even though these potentially harmful memories and events are tucked away in our unconscious they can still affect us giving rise to mental problems and disorders (Plotnik, 2002). Treatment for these problems and disorders therefore involves ways to pull those repressed memories into the conscious mind to avoid self-conflicts. One of the treatments that Sybil received to uncover her repressed memories was hypnosis. Hypnosis is the guided journey into the unconscious in which the hypnotist is able to gain the trust of the patient and uncover memories, feelings, and thoughts, which might otherwise not be revealed (Plotnik,2002). During Sybil’s treatment for Dissociative Identity Disorder she was guided through hypnosis many times in order to expose repressed memories. Through hypnosis Dr. Wilbur was able to “walk” Sybil through her traumatic childhood memories and gain powerful information needed for her recovery. Some of the information from Sybil’s hypnosis included who Sybil was tormented by and why certain inanimate objects would generate such intense fear in her. In Sybil’s case, hypnosis proved to be an extremely powerful tool in helping her reveal the causes of her disorder. Even though hypnosis played a very important role in Sybil’s recovery the only way that she was ever truly able to overcome her disorder in the end was by self-realization. After extensive counseling Sybil was finally ready to face her fears. Sybil was able to start accepting the traumatic events that created each of her personalities, in turn slowly becoming “one” again. In an ending scene Dr. Wilbur takes Sybil to a park near where she grew-up. There in that park Sybil was finally able to realize that what happened to her was real and wrong. By stating out loud in an emotional explosion Sybil was able to accept the traumatic events that produced one of her most troubling identities. The process of rationalizing her fears allowed Sybil to rid herself of one of her multiple identities. Although, there are no finite causes for the development of Dissociative Identity Disorder the main cause seems to stem from an abusive past usually involving extreme maltreatment and torment. In Sybil’s case her mentally unstable and abusive mother turned out to be the main cause of her disorder. Unfortunately, the death of Sybil’s mother was not the solution to her problems. After her mother’s death Sybil was forced to live a life of bare subsistence, while attending college, due to her father’s financial neglect. Sybil was daily subjected to severe mental and physical abuse for so long it would affect her for the rest of her life. Fortunately, after eleven years of counseling she was able to fulfill her dreams and lead a somewhat normal life as a professor of art. Although Sybil’s case was proven to be genuine soon after the movie was released there was what seemed to be an epidemic of patients that were diagnosed with Dissociative Identity Disorder. This outbreak of Dissociative Identity Disorder induced questions concerning just how many of the diagnosed patients actually were afflicted with the disorder. These questions produced a ...