Psychology case study on the character Sybil from the novel Sybil Essay

Psychology case study on the character Sybil from the novel Sybil author Schreiber - Essay Example Another common group of disorder is usually termed anxiety disorders. Personality disorder is not really a mental illness that tends to develop quite suddenly and usually in response to particular stresses. In fact, it develops slowly, as the person grows up and is thought to be mainly due to environment and upbringing. For example, in Sybil's case, she grew up in a family with no love, constant beatings and a mother who suffers from schizophrenia, naturally she will develop anti-social behavior or a paranoid personality; but it seems it's more than that because she developed 16 different personalities, worst is she has a male counterpart of herself. A growing body of evidence also suggests that early sexual abuse also distorts the development of a healthy personality. Sybil's case is more of psychoanalytic in nature because she in conflict with herself wherein her mind is an expression of conflicting forces - some conscious, the majority unconscious. Her condition involves the unconscious where unpleasant experiences are repressed, the conflict arising from the unconscious mind when her set of beliefs impacts adversely on another area of beliefs, causing emotional suffering felt as disappointment, anger or frustration. It also involves her drives and instincts as well as her personality in the genetic viewpoint. Years before, this illness was simply called hysteria. Sybil's traumatic childhood and the abuses that she had experienced resulted to the development of sixteen (16) personalities. Symptoms of the illness include amnesia, depersonalization, derealization, depression and anxiety or mental illness. Amnesia in this type of disorder is the experience at certain periods of time when Sybil forgets both events and people. This type of memory loss is more extensive than the forgetfulness that we normally experience. Dissociative amenesia, as it is called is the trademark of this illness as it can't be explained by physical or neurological condition. Dissociative Identity Disorder is an illness which makes the affected person 'switch' to another personality whenever he or she is experiencing stress and or severe anxiety. Experiences may include several different people taking inside your head, having their own name, own story and characteristics. They also have their own qualities as manifes ted in the voice, manner, gender and even physical qualities. Sybil indeed have all of these present, as she has sixteen different personalities, having different physical characteristics, attitudes and even gender, as she also had two male personalities of herself. Sybil's 'alternate self' is a mirror of what she feels inside. Her desires of being confident, self-assured and all that is positive that she wanted to experience as all these were "robbed" from her in her childhood days. Due to her traumatic experience in her mother's hands and her father's indifference to her situation made her grow up having so much pain, hatred and confusion in herself that instead of molding her into a stronger person, she tended into the "unfortunate" side - DID. In her growing up years, Sybil in some way also showed Reaction-Formation, a process by which we can disguise our true motives or desires when such would cause us guilt or shame if we really face up to them. The defense consists in strongly expressing the very