Sybil by Flora Rheta Schreiber Read Free Book Online

office at the Medical Arts Building but at Clarkson.
    Outside the hospital Hattie and Sybil sat in the car--the mother biting her fingernails, the daughter grinding her teeth. Inside, Dr. Wilbur managed to dispel Willard Dorsett's visions of his daughter's being locked in and restrained, of her undergoing a lobotomy, of her getting worse because of contact with other patients more disturbed than she, and of her getting well enough to go home only to relapse and return to the hospital. He had envisioned hospitalization as an endless, unremitting cycle of in and out, out and in.
    Dispelled, too, was the deepest of all her father's fears: that his daughter would be given drugs. "No," Dr. Wilbur assured him, "we wouldn't do that."
    Finally, then, although Willard Dorsett had an uneasy feeling about the psychiatric course on which his daughter had embarked, he did give his consent for her hospitalization at Clarkson.
    Clarkson, as Dr. Wilbur saw it, was to be only a temporary measure. What Sybil needed ultimately, the doctor felt, was psychoanalysis. "You are the sort of person who should be psychoanalyzed," she told her patient. "I would like to do the job myself, but I'm not an analyst yet. In fact, I shall be leaving Omaha shortly to begin my analytic training. I suggest that after you leave Clarkson you go to Chicago to be analyzed."
    The prospect thrilled Sybil. Chicago meant not only moving closer to the truth about herself but also getting away from home. Psychoanalysis, however, posed a problem for Willard and Hattie Dorsett. They had agreed to the psychiatric treatment, even to plans for hospitalization, but psychoanalysis was a different matter.
    The couch and the serpent. The parents feared that the strange world of the psychoanalyst's couch might be antithetical to their most deeply held religious convictions, would probably exclude God from the picture. Their religion, to which Sybil's father had been born and which her mother, originally a Methodist, had embraced some years after her marriage, taught that each individual has the privilege of choosing between God and the devil, between God and the Lucifer of the prophecies, between God and the serpent of the Scriptures. The devil, the religion taught, could exert control. Everyone, the Dorsetts believed, has the privilege of choosing between God and the devil; God, assuming full responsibility for the actions of those who chose Him, could carry all who choose rightly to Paradise. Conversely, their religion posited, those who choose the devil will travel a different road.
    Fearing to commit his daughter and, through her, himself, to the devil, Willard Dorsett could not give Sybil an answer when she pleaded with him to permit her to go to Chicago for psychoanalysis.
    "I don't know," he told her. "I'll have to talk it over with Pastor Weber."
    The pastor, decisive in most things, shared Willard Dorsett's doubts of the benefits of psychoanalysis. The two men were very close, and, impressed with Dorsett's talents as a builder-contractor, the pastor had engaged him to build churches for the denomination. As they talked in the half-built church on which Dorsett was working, the pastor was noncommittal. "I don't know, Brother Dorsett. I just don't know," he repeated several times.
    After a silence Dorsett himself remarked, "I would be more comfortable if the Chicago psychoanalyst were of our own faith. I'm afraid that a doctor outside our faith will use drugs, hypnosis, and other techniques to which I am opposed."
    Pacing the floor of the church, the pastor was thoughtful and perplexed. When he finally spoke, it was only to say, "You'll just have to decide for yourself, Brother Dorsett. I'd like to help you, but frankly I don't know what to advise."
    This time it was Dorsett who paced. He replied apprehensively, "If God isn't part of the therapy, they'll have a hard time leading me into this channel."
    "Yes," the pastor concurred, "it's like leading a mule in Missouri into a