All About Eve

The patient sitting in the office of Drs. Corbett H. Thigpen and Hervey M. Cleckley in Augusta, Ga. was a neat, colorless woman of 25 who held herself primly as she described her symptoms in monotonous though cultivated accents and stilted language. Her name, for the purpose of the amazing case history now reported by the two psychiatrists in The Three Faces of Eve (McGraw-Hill: $4.50), is Eve White. For the most part, her troubles had been no more unusual than severe headaches or mild blackouts, but that afternoon she recounted a weirdly disturbing episode: one day, of which she had no recollection, she must have gone out and bought a lot of flashy clothes--enough to put her and her husband Ralph in debt for years. The evidence was in her closet.

Suddenly, as she talked. Eve White began to change. She looked dazed; then the lines of her face altered in a slow, rippling transformation. Her hands dropped lightly from her head to her lap. She relaxed into an attitude of comfort that Dr. Thigpen had never seen before. Her blue eyes opened wide and sparkled. She gave a quick, restless smile. In a bright, unfamiliar voice, she said: "Hi there, Doc!" Everything about her had become coquettishly provocative.

"Who Is She?" Eve White neither smoked nor drank, but now the patient asked Dr. Thigpen for a cigarette. As she puffed, she prattled in her new, brittle voice: "She's been having a real tough time. She's such a damn dope though . . . What she puts up with from that sorry Ralph White--and all her mooning over the little brat! To hell with it, I say!"

Who, the doctor asked, was "she"?

"Why, Eve White, of course, your long-suffering, saintly little patient."

"But aren't you Eve White?"

"That's for laughs. You ought to know better than that, Doc!'

Before Psychiatrist Thigpen's eyes, Eve White had changed into a different personality. She gave herself the name Eve Black. Sometimes the new personality appeared spontaneously. At other times the psychiatrists hypnotized Eve White, called upon Eve Black to appear, and White turned into Black. The alter ego, it developed, was fun-loving and nightclub-haunting, a smoker, drinker, dancer, leader-on of men, and daring dresser--all the things that Eve White could never be.

Eve White's headaches occurred when Eve Black was trying to "come out." It was the Black personality in possession of Eve White's body who had bought those expensive clothes. Eve Black was fully conscious of what Eve White was doing all the time, but Eve White knew nothing of Eve Black--until she came out of a blackout to find her closet full of low-cut dresses, or woke up with a hangover that Eve Black had incurred.

Enter Jane. Treading gently, because there are fewer than a hundred cases of dual personality in medical literature, and none well authenticated in the last 50 years, Psychiatrists Thigpen and Cleckley put their patient in a hospital, where she could be observed and get psychotherapy. Even under treatment. Eve Black "came out" and misbehaved occasionally. Batteries of psychological tests showed two distinct personalities, far more sharply differentiated in voice, speech, posture, mannerisms, handwriting and emotions than the most brilliant actress could have portrayed. Yet there was not the faintest suggestion of a mental illness resembling schizophrenia (the so-called "split personality"). Here were two rational personalities inhabiting the same body--though irresponsible Eve Black had some earmarks of a mild psychopath.

Eve White seemed to get better and went home. Then she had a relapse. In Dr. Thigpen's office she went into a two-minute trance. As her eyes opened, she stared blankly around the room. She fixed them on the doctor. Then, "with an unknown but curiously impressive voice and with immeasurable poise." she asked: "Who are you?" This was Eve White's third personality, soon christened Jane.

Unlike Eve Black, who had probably coexisted with Eve White since childhood, Jane appeared to have just been born. She was more intelligent and had a better command of language than either Eve, and was a more mature personality, but she had no memory of any past. Jane always knew what either Eve was doing; neither knew about her.

Eve White left her husband (they were of different faiths, and there was conflict over the religious training of their daughter Bonnie, then five). She took job after job, but lost each in turn because Eve Black kept "coming out" and misbehaving scandalously. Ralph White made a belated effort at reunion with his wife; Eve White refused to go with him, but Eve Black spent a few days with him in Florida. To him it was like an adulterous but agreeable escapade, but when Eve White re-emerged to consciousness, she was disgusted by what she had been doing and left promptly.

"Mother! Don't!" Gradually the Jane (third) side of her personality got the upper hand and fell in love with an engineer named Earl Lancaster. But she was still subject to unpredictable changes in personality. The psychiatrists, who by now had devoured the technical books on Jekyll-and-Hyde phenomena and had consulted colleagues across the country, were still baffled in their effort to find the underlying cause in this case. One day their patient, then in her Jane phase, gave them a strong clue. Dr. Thigpen asked to speak to Eve White. As the two doctors describe the incident: "Jane's neck stiffened abruptly ... A wild light of terror glinted in her eyes. The features . . . had contorted to unrecognizable chaos. Staring now in glassy horror . . . she suddenly cried out in frantic, shattered tones: 'Mother! Oh Mother! Don't make me! Don't! Don't! I can't do it. I can't.' Seizing her head at the temples with both hands, she began a banshee's scream."

What mother had wanted her daughter, then five, to do was to touch the face of her dead grandmother in farewell just before the funeral. Psychiatrists Thigpen and Cleckley are extremely cautious in using this incident as the basis of an explanation of the Eve-Eve-Jane split. But, they say, the little girl had already gained, from previous experiences, an overwhelming fear of death and the dead. This incident, they suggest, may have triggered a flight from reality in which the original personality (most closely resembling Jane) was replaced by the compulsive Eve White, while the hoydenish Eve Black served as an outlet for earthy impulses that Eve White could not accept.

In therapy, both Eve White and Eve Black eventually agreed that they should "die." The personality resembling Jane became strengthened and modified so that the reintegrated patient became formally known as Evelyn White. She learned to love Eve White's daughter as her own. As Mrs. Earl Lancaster she has now been well for two years, living in the Middle West, free of visitations by either Eve.

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