Sybil Isabel Dorsett* The most famous case of multiple personality

She seems to have experienced 16 separate personalities, two of whom were male.

It was the horrific child abuse Sybil's psychotic mother inflicted on her, along with the failure of her father to rescue her from it, that caused these personalities. Each one embodied feelings and emotions the 'real' Sybil could not cope with. The waking Sybil was deprived of all these emotions, and was therefore a rather drab figure. She was unaware of her other personas; while they were in 'control' of the body, Sybil suffered blackouts and did not remember the episodes. It was only the intervention of Dr. Cornelia Wilbur, a psychoanalyst, that alerted Sybil to them.

The sequence of "splitting" which by which these alter egos appear to have emerged as separate identities is outlined in the 'family tree' above. You can explore these personalities - who they were, and why they existed - by clicking on their names, below.

Sybil, the original core personality split, early on, with the emergence of:

Peggy Lou split yet further, to give the boys, Mike and Sid.

Also, the lesser known but equally interesting story of Eric, 1982

The angry or aggressive personality
An angry personality appears to be one of the most common in MPD patients. Peggy was created by one of Sybil's earliest dissociations in order to cope with the anger which Sybil felt towards her mother but was never able to express. Later splitting into Peggy Lou (angry)and Peggy Ann (afraid), the importance of Peggy to Sybil can be seen in the fact that she took over for two years of her life when things were too much to cope with (remember that Peggy Lou was the one who kept her arithmetic skills to herself so that Sybil struggled back at school as her waking self). Nancy (Winer, 1978) too, first created Kitty, her angry alter ego, in order to deal with the strong aggressive feelings she felt for her mother after she found her sleeping with her first serious boyfriend. Lillian, too, was created in order to cope with the anger Nancy felt towards her husband when she discovered that he had been seeing another woman while she was in hospital giving birth to their child.

The personality who deals with sex
A personality formed to deal with sex appears to be fairly common. From the data above it is clear that the personality can have many different characteristics. Within its function, the personality may portray different attitudes towards sex. Many of Sybil's alter egos are very prim and proper about sex due to her/their religious beliefs. Alternatively, Nancy (Winer, 1978) created a seductive personality, Lillian, to look after her sex life, having caught her husband playing around.

* Department of Psychology, of the University of Newcastle upon Tyne (http://york39.ncl.ac.uk/www/P3.html)