It was the horrific child abuse that Sybil's psychotic mother inflicted on her, along with her father's failure to save her from what caused these personalities. Each embodied feelings and emotions that the "real" Sybil couldn't deal with. Upon awakening, the Sibyl was deprived of all these emotions, of anger and aggression just to name a few. And he was therefore a rather sad figure. He was unaware of his other characters; while they had 'control' of the body, Sybil suffered blackouts and did not remember the episodes. It was only the intervention of Dr. Cornelia Wilbur, a psychoanalyst, that alerted Sybil. Sybil's case is most often credited with reintroducing the public and mental health professionals to multiple personality syndrome. Multiple personality disorder (MPD) is a psychiatric disorder characterized by the presence of at least one "altered" personality that controls behavior. The "alters" are said to occur spontaneously and involuntarily and function more or less independently of each other. In 1994, the American Psychiatric Association's DSM-IV replaced the designation of MPD with DID: Dissociative disorders are characterized by a disruption in the normal functioning of consciousness, identity, memory, or the world around it. Dissociative disorders can be acute or chronic. All dissociative disorders are believed to result from trauma experienced by the individual suffering from this disorder. The dissociative aspect is believed to be a coping mechanism: the person literally dissociates from a situation or experience that is too traumatic to integrate with their conscious self. Symptoms of these disorders, or even one or more disorders themselves, are also found in a number of other mental illnesses, including post-traumatic stress disorder, panic disorder, and obsessive compulsive disorder. Sybil Dorsett was a woman with sixteen separate personalities. At first none of them knew or remembered any of the others. For example, a personality named Victoria Antoinette Scharleau was a confident, sophisticated, and attractive blonde, and another named Mike Dorsett thought she was male, a builder and carpenter. This type of multiple personality disorder is often caused by extreme negative events that occurred during childhood. In Sybil's case, she was tortured and sexually abused as a young girl. This literally led to her breaking down, because she couldn't handle the extreme abuse she was subjected to.DSMIV