Cogito ergo sum

"You say," the doctor remarked unrelentingly, "that Peggy Lou, Peggy Ann, Mary, and the others couldn't be the same person. But they can be. Vicky, don't you see that they could be different aspects of the same person?"

"No, Dr. Wilbur," Vicky said thoughtfully, shaking her head. "I don't see. You, you're just you. You're Dr. Wilbur and no one else."

"Yes?" the doctor asked.

"And I'm just Vicky. There's nobody else here. See." Vicky rose from the couch, paced the room, and asked, "Now do you believe me?"

Vicky sat down again, smiled at the doctor, and remarked, "That settles the question. There's no one else here. You're just Dr. Wilbur, and I'm just Vicky."

"Vicky," the doctor replied, "we haven't settled anything. Let's be honest with each other."

"But, Dr. Wilbur," Vicky insisted, "we most certainly have. We've settled the large, philosophical question of who am I? I am I. You are you. I think; therefore I am. There's a Latin phrase for it: cogito ergo sum. Yes, that's it."

"We've settled nothing," the doctor reminded Vicky. "We haven't established the relationship among Sybil, Peggy Lou, Peggy Ann, Mary and the others. What ...?"
"Questions, questions, questions," Vicky interrupted.

"I'd like to ask a question, too. Why do you have to ask all these questions?"
After rejecting the logical conclusion toward which Dr. Wilbur had been trying to lead her, Vicky contradicted the earlier contention that the doctor and she were alone, for she said, "Now, Dr. Wilbur, Mary would like to meet you. She wants to participate in our analysis, and I think we should let her."

"Our analysis?" Dr. Wilbur echoed. "How can it be "our" if you girls are not the same person?"

Vicky chuckled. "I suppose," she said with what seemed like deliberate ambiguity, "you might call it group therapy."

"You agreed you were sisters." Vicky was quick. "Family therapy, then, if you insist. Thanks for the correction."

Then, as surely as if she had physically left the room, Vicky was gone. A voice that definitely was not Vicky's remarked politely, "I'm glad to meet you, Dr. Wilbur."

"You're Mary?" the doctor asked. "Mary Lucinda Saunders Dorsett," the voice replied.
It was not the voice of a woman of the world like Vicky, nor of an angry child like Peggy Lou. The accent was unmistakably midwestern, soft, low, and somber. The doctor had not heard that voice before and knew of Mary only through Vicky's recapitulation of the sixth grade.

Sybil
Flora Rheta Schreiber