Book of a lifetime: Sybil by Flora Rheta Schreiber

From The Independent archive: Lesley Glaister on a classic tale of multiple personalities

Jessica Lange and Tammy Blanchard in a 2007 TV adaptation of ‘Sybil’ (Warner Bros/Alamy)

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. 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.

Sybil relates the treatment of Sybil Dorsett (not her real name) by a psychoanalyst. 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. Even more peculiarly, these personalities – 16 in all, female and male, and of different ages – knew about Sybil and about each other.

All Sybil knew was that she would lose time, sometimes waking to find herself in an unfamiliar place, or dressed in a stranger’s clothes. Once she woke to find that someone had actually built a wall down the middle of her room during the night.