Sybil Movie Character Analysis

The character Sybil, suffers from dissociative identity disorder (DID). According to Nevid, Rathus, and Greene (2018), “In dissociative identity disorder, two or more personalities- each with its own distinctive traits, memories, mannerisms, and even style of speech- ‘occupy’ one person” (209). This is seen in the portrayal of Shirley Adrell Mason, in the movie Sybil. In the beginning of the movie, Sybil explains to a therapist how she meets people who claim to know her, finds clothes in her closet in which she has never seen before, and wakes up in places she doesn’t remember going to. Sybil is the person at the core who is polite and calm; she claims that she comes from a family who loved her and treated her kindly. She tells her therapist that she cannot get angry because it is a sin-

This model takes into consideration the social and cultural aspects, including gender, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status, while placing a large amount of emphasis on the societal failures, rather than the individual (Nevid et al., 2018). It delves deeper into how individuals move through life in accordance to their society and in their relationships. According to Scott O. Lilienfeld (1999), “DID patients adopt and enact social roles geared to their aspirations and the demand of characteristics of carried social contexts” (508). Roles are thought to be more spontaneous than conscious. In the case of Sybil, these theorists would take into account that she lived a rough childhood with a mother who was abusive. She experienced a culture in which it was not okay to have emotions, and a culture where the one’s she loved most died in traumatic ways in front of her. The personal culture in which she grew up in was not uplifting, but it was all she knew and therefore, it is hard to escape. Socio-cultural theorists would most likely posit the reason for her disorder on the traumatic culture she grew up