“In Pieces” by Sally Field (post 4): Good at playing Sybil, woman with multiple personality, because both had “similar psychological survival techniques”

“I received a call…to audition for a role against the wishes of everyone else involved…Sybil…the story of a young woman with severe dissociative identity disorder, or multiple personality…

“I had worked my whole life—lived my whole life—to play this role…I knew her. She belonged to me. And though I never consciously saw how connected I was to Sybil, never saw myself as having similar psychological survival techniques, I knew my own childhood difficulties would fuel the work, knew this role was mine even if no one else in the room thought so…

“I knew I had to go into this meeting as the passive, shell persona of Sybil herself: baggy colorless clothes, no makeup, neat but uncoiffed hair. My old ragamuffin look…

After getting and successfully playing the role, she says…

“I had lived inside of Sybil, felt her longing to know who she was, to know the parts that had protected her and the parts that she was afraid to meet. Did I start to know my own selves as I became more capable of calling on them in my acting? When I walked off the stage, away from the work, did I lose the ability to hear them freely, forget they were even there, becoming a version of Sybil’s shell? I don’t know” (1, pp. 290-306).

Comment

It is not only that Sally Field’s multiple personality trait enabled her to credibly play a person with multiple personality disorder, but it appears that she finds acting, per se, to be therapeutic: it facilitates awareness of, and working with, her alternate personalities.

1. Sally Field. In Pieces: a memoir. New York, Grand Central Publishing, 2018.