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The Control of Eve: The True Story Behind the Three Faces of Eve
In The Rape of Eve: The True Story Behind the Three Faces of Eve, Dr. Ross provides a documented account of the exploitation of Chris Sizemore, the real Eve, by her psychiatrist, Dr. Corbett Thigpen. In 1953, Dr. Thigpen had Chris Sizemore sign over her lifetime story rights to him and his colleague, Dr. Hervey Cleckley: the two doctors paid her $3.00 for these rights--one dollar for each of her three personalities. This was all the money she received for the best-selling book The Three Faces of Eve, written by Drs. Thigpen and Cleckley. The control, exploitation and abuse of Chris Sizemore by the author of her biography lasted from the early 1950's into the 1990's and ended only with Dr. Thigpen's death.
The Rape of Eve is based on extensive background research and documents gathered by Dr. Ross, Chris Costner Sizemore and Jerry Naylor as they worked together on the book.
The Rape of Eve is based on extensive background research and documents gathered by Dr. Ross, Chris Costner Sizemore and Jerry Naylor as they worked together on the book.
232 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2012
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
December 9, 2019
This book is horribly written.
Based on the letters the author Dr. Ross reproduces that were written by Dr. Corbett H. Thigpen, the psychiatrist of “Eve”—Chris Costner Sizemore—I have no doubt much of what Ross says about the way Chris was manipulated by Thigpen is true; but it’s still horribly written. Worse, the accusation of sexual abuse seems to come out of nowhere with no evidence; I presume he heard it from Chris herself, but he doesn’t explore the incidents, just states the accusation as fact, and moves on—more than once.
Ross either repeats certain points, over and over and over again, as if sheer emphasis will prove him right; or doesn’t explain other things that should be explained. If he was truly trying to do a service to Sizemore, he’s failed: The book is too unprofessional for that. In an appendix he goes off on a tangent about mind-control doctors, seeming to posit that most “inpatients” with dissociative identity disorder (DID) acquired DID because of CIA experiments, projects he calls by acronyms that are left unexplained: It’s bizarre.
If Ross didn’t have enough material for a book, he could’ve written a lengthy article instead. He still would’ve needed someone to help him with his writing skills. I’m only not giving the book one-star because “Eve’s” self-serving psychiatrists needed to be exposed in some way. One big problem is Ross (who admittedly never treated Chris), despite professing the opposite, also comes across as self-serving.
*
Interesting to me:
In a letter from Dr. Thigpen to his patient Chris Costner Sizemore on April 16, 1956:
There is a new play called LIZZIE [based on Shirley Jackson’s The Bird Nest] which is based on multiple personality which could discount any interest they [the moviemakers] have in your story. (53%)
In a letter from Dr. Thigpen to Chris on December 14, 1956, speaking of his co-authored book, The Three Faces Of Eve:
[In the book]…an occasional incident is described which did not actually happen but which could have happened. (57%)
Wouldn’t this make The Three Faces of Eve fiction, or fictional, and not the academic study it’s purported to be? Ross fails to point this out, adding to my feeling that he cared only for his own agenda.
Based on the letters the author Dr. Ross reproduces that were written by Dr. Corbett H. Thigpen, the psychiatrist of “Eve”—Chris Costner Sizemore—I have no doubt much of what Ross says about the way Chris was manipulated by Thigpen is true; but it’s still horribly written. Worse, the accusation of sexual abuse seems to come out of nowhere with no evidence; I presume he heard it from Chris herself, but he doesn’t explore the incidents, just states the accusation as fact, and moves on—more than once.
Ross either repeats certain points, over and over and over again, as if sheer emphasis will prove him right; or doesn’t explain other things that should be explained. If he was truly trying to do a service to Sizemore, he’s failed: The book is too unprofessional for that. In an appendix he goes off on a tangent about mind-control doctors, seeming to posit that most “inpatients” with dissociative identity disorder (DID) acquired DID because of CIA experiments, projects he calls by acronyms that are left unexplained: It’s bizarre.
If Ross didn’t have enough material for a book, he could’ve written a lengthy article instead. He still would’ve needed someone to help him with his writing skills. I’m only not giving the book one-star because “Eve’s” self-serving psychiatrists needed to be exposed in some way. One big problem is Ross (who admittedly never treated Chris), despite professing the opposite, also comes across as self-serving.
*
Interesting to me:
In a letter from Dr. Thigpen to his patient Chris Costner Sizemore on April 16, 1956:
There is a new play called LIZZIE [based on Shirley Jackson’s The Bird Nest] which is based on multiple personality which could discount any interest they [the moviemakers] have in your story. (53%)
In a letter from Dr. Thigpen to Chris on December 14, 1956, speaking of his co-authored book, The Three Faces Of Eve:
[In the book]…an occasional incident is described which did not actually happen but which could have happened. (57%)
Wouldn’t this make The Three Faces of Eve fiction, or fictional, and not the academic study it’s purported to be? Ross fails to point this out, adding to my feeling that he cared only for his own agenda.
January 31, 2015
Anyone who knows me knows that I like my mental health memoirs - the old pre-Sybil cases of multiple personality especially. And it's certainly no secret that Chris Costner Sizemore's case is one of my all-time favourite case histories (twenty-eight status updates for I'm Eve? srsly?).
But the major problem with Chris Costner Sizemore - and it has, to my profound irritation, never been more obvious - is that she's a revisionist. Each of the six (!) substantial accounts of her life and illness represents - to one degree or another - a retroactive rewrite of the ones before it:
1. 1957's The Three Faces of Eve reads like a fairly typical case of multiple personality from 'the golden age of the unconscious' in the late 19th Century. The nervous, religious and dutiful 'Eve White', trapped in an awful marriage, finds herself abruptly turning into the confident, amoral and charming 'Eve Black' - something that, it turns out, has been happening all her life. In the course of a hypnosis-heavy psychiatric treatment, a 'doctor's pet' third personality - 'Jane', later Jane Lancaster - emerges: a charming intellectual that appears to combine the best traits of her two 'sisters' but has none of their memories. After a therapeutic 'Eureka!' moment in which Jane abruptly remembers a traumatic incident from her girlhood, Eve White and Eve Black disappear, bequeathing Jane their memories. Jane, her young daughter and her new husband go off into the sunset together. There is a lucrative film starring Joanne Woodward.
2. 1958's The Final Face of Eve undercuts this happy ending at once with the revelation that Jane's brief career as a single personality is such a disaster that she attempts suicide - and, apparently, succeeds. A final 'fourth face' - the 'Evelyn Lancaster' who writes the memoir - emerges to save the body and take over. Evelyn is apparently fine now: 'cured' for real - though an afterword by Thigpen and Cleckley fails to account for the unexpected personality reshuffle that happened in their absence.
3. A lengthy magazine article published by 'Life' in 1958 to promote Evelyn's new book offers a substantially different account even to this: after two years of silence from Jane, in which everyone assumes she is 'dead', she suddenly reemerges as a spiteful persecutor of Evelyn - who finds herself shoplifting in fugues, and writing herself and her husband nasty notes. A final therapy session with her old doctors - apparently on the subject of her mysterious first marriage - removes Jane for good.
4. 1977's I'm Eve - written under Sizemore's real name - reframes the whole previous canon in the context of an ongoing disorder. After three gruesome (non-sexual) traumas at age 2, Chris begins to dissociate into different personalities. For a little while, she is still herself - as evidenced by multiple textual notes in her 'present-day' voice, in which she describes her baffled young self as 'I', not 'her' or 'she' - alternating with a wicked disobedient personality and a calm indifferent personality. Somewhere between the ages of six and ten - the memoir strongly implies the latter - her original self disappears, and Chris begins living her life in multiples of three alter egos at a time - good, bad and apathetic - with a gradual turnover as they 'die' and are replaced. Eve White, Eve Black and Jane Lancaster are the latest in a long line that continues long after Chris's therapy and well into the 1970s. All of them have some knowledge of Chris's life before their appearance except Jane (who never had the lifetime's worth of memories the previous accounts assert, and who was only absent a few weeks after her suicide attempt), and most of their arrivals and departures as characters are linked with deaths elsewhere in the family. The 'real' Chris Costner Sizemore finally emerges in therapy after the last of her final trio of alters disappears, having spent 'forty years in fantasy'. Sizemore claims that a lot of incidents in the previous accounts of her life are sheer fabrication on the part of her controlling doctors - to whom she signed over the rights to her own life story during therapy, very much to her own financial detriment. Thigpen, particularly, comes across as a Nasty Piece of Work.
5. 1989's A Mind of My Own corresponds broadly to the new narrative, but, alas, adds some subtle retcons to the story too. The roster of alter personalities changes inexplicably. The disturbing abreactions that in her previous memoir are described as happening shortly before her recovery - to a different personality, in other words - are moved to shortly afterward, and the series of flashbacks described as a 'week of hell' in I'm Eve is now expanded to six weeks. Sizemore now traces the submergence of her original personality to the age of two, not ten. She describes a day or two spent lurking in the back of the mind of her last alter 'the Retrace Lady', shortly before her reawakening - something she entirely fails to mention in I'm Eve and which is contradicted by a tantalising note elsewhere in the text that states that, for a brief while during her recovery, Sizemore actually believed that she was still 'the Retrace Lady'.
6. And now we have 2014's The Rape of Eve. Co-written with the loathsome Colin Ross - who makes Thigpen and Cleckley look like positive saints, and who is never ever getting any of my money if I can possibly help it - this final account features, among other things, Sizemore's assertions that Dr. Thigpen regularly sexually assaulted her during their sessions together. Google Books offers me this charming little snippet:
And, you know what? Pass.
One revision too many.
But the major problem with Chris Costner Sizemore - and it has, to my profound irritation, never been more obvious - is that she's a revisionist. Each of the six (!) substantial accounts of her life and illness represents - to one degree or another - a retroactive rewrite of the ones before it:
1. 1957's The Three Faces of Eve reads like a fairly typical case of multiple personality from 'the golden age of the unconscious' in the late 19th Century. The nervous, religious and dutiful 'Eve White', trapped in an awful marriage, finds herself abruptly turning into the confident, amoral and charming 'Eve Black' - something that, it turns out, has been happening all her life. In the course of a hypnosis-heavy psychiatric treatment, a 'doctor's pet' third personality - 'Jane', later Jane Lancaster - emerges: a charming intellectual that appears to combine the best traits of her two 'sisters' but has none of their memories. After a therapeutic 'Eureka!' moment in which Jane abruptly remembers a traumatic incident from her girlhood, Eve White and Eve Black disappear, bequeathing Jane their memories. Jane, her young daughter and her new husband go off into the sunset together. There is a lucrative film starring Joanne Woodward.
2. 1958's The Final Face of Eve undercuts this happy ending at once with the revelation that Jane's brief career as a single personality is such a disaster that she attempts suicide - and, apparently, succeeds. A final 'fourth face' - the 'Evelyn Lancaster' who writes the memoir - emerges to save the body and take over. Evelyn is apparently fine now: 'cured' for real - though an afterword by Thigpen and Cleckley fails to account for the unexpected personality reshuffle that happened in their absence.
3. A lengthy magazine article published by 'Life' in 1958 to promote Evelyn's new book offers a substantially different account even to this: after two years of silence from Jane, in which everyone assumes she is 'dead', she suddenly reemerges as a spiteful persecutor of Evelyn - who finds herself shoplifting in fugues, and writing herself and her husband nasty notes. A final therapy session with her old doctors - apparently on the subject of her mysterious first marriage - removes Jane for good.
4. 1977's I'm Eve - written under Sizemore's real name - reframes the whole previous canon in the context of an ongoing disorder. After three gruesome (non-sexual) traumas at age 2, Chris begins to dissociate into different personalities. For a little while, she is still herself - as evidenced by multiple textual notes in her 'present-day' voice, in which she describes her baffled young self as 'I', not 'her' or 'she' - alternating with a wicked disobedient personality and a calm indifferent personality. Somewhere between the ages of six and ten - the memoir strongly implies the latter - her original self disappears, and Chris begins living her life in multiples of three alter egos at a time - good, bad and apathetic - with a gradual turnover as they 'die' and are replaced. Eve White, Eve Black and Jane Lancaster are the latest in a long line that continues long after Chris's therapy and well into the 1970s. All of them have some knowledge of Chris's life before their appearance except Jane (who never had the lifetime's worth of memories the previous accounts assert, and who was only absent a few weeks after her suicide attempt), and most of their arrivals and departures as characters are linked with deaths elsewhere in the family. The 'real' Chris Costner Sizemore finally emerges in therapy after the last of her final trio of alters disappears, having spent 'forty years in fantasy'. Sizemore claims that a lot of incidents in the previous accounts of her life are sheer fabrication on the part of her controlling doctors - to whom she signed over the rights to her own life story during therapy, very much to her own financial detriment. Thigpen, particularly, comes across as a Nasty Piece of Work.
5. 1989's A Mind of My Own corresponds broadly to the new narrative, but, alas, adds some subtle retcons to the story too. The roster of alter personalities changes inexplicably. The disturbing abreactions that in her previous memoir are described as happening shortly before her recovery - to a different personality, in other words - are moved to shortly afterward, and the series of flashbacks described as a 'week of hell' in I'm Eve is now expanded to six weeks. Sizemore now traces the submergence of her original personality to the age of two, not ten. She describes a day or two spent lurking in the back of the mind of her last alter 'the Retrace Lady', shortly before her reawakening - something she entirely fails to mention in I'm Eve and which is contradicted by a tantalising note elsewhere in the text that states that, for a brief while during her recovery, Sizemore actually believed that she was still 'the Retrace Lady'.
6. And now we have 2014's The Rape of Eve. Co-written with the loathsome Colin Ross - who makes Thigpen and Cleckley look like positive saints, and who is never ever getting any of my money if I can possibly help it - this final account features, among other things, Sizemore's assertions that Dr. Thigpen regularly sexually assaulted her during their sessions together. Google Books offers me this charming little snippet:
The shock of the news has made me sad. I am sad at the mention of his death. He was so much a part of my life for the past forty-eight years. Somehow, I don't know what I will do without him being there. He was always there, always in my head, and just a telephone call away. Am I relieved, or am I frightened? The emotions tumble through my mind.
Suddenly, I begin to shake and my heart races. I hear his voice - that very familiar voice. 'Sugar pie, if I should die before you, you must not tell anyone about our secrets. You must not write about them or tell anyone. You will cause hurt to my family, and to yours if you do! And, you know you don't want to hurt anyone. Remember, you must never tell anyone about our secrets!'
His voice is so clear. I look around to see where the voice is coming from.
Beads of sweat cover my forehead, my hands are damp, and my breath is short. Is Thigpen controlling me from the grave? I have been worried what additional triggers he may have planted within my subconscious. I have constantly asked my associates if this is possible - now it seems to be here.
Why is he calling out to me now? In my conscious mind I know he is dead. He can no longer hurt me. He can no longer control me. He can no longer do... No, I promised I won't tell anyone about that. I can't talk about all of those times. He made me promise. He said I would cause hurt to his family if I told. He said I would hurt my family too.
And, you know what? Pass.
One revision too many.
December 4, 2025
Yuck
This book deals with Eve and her faces only as a background to the author's desire to condemn the doctor who admittedly took advantage of her. There's a really interesting story there , but it gets bogged down in endless (it seems) criticism of the doctor's methods and looong descriptions of what the author would have done better. Way too many letters included between the doctor and various people involved but probably not central to the plot.
I admit that attempts to plump up a book and to insert unnecessary content to the story to add length is one of my pet peeves. I also hate it when an author uses a book to endlessly tell how much smarter he/she is to the actual subjects of the book.
Both of those things are very abundant in this book.
I made it about a third of the book before I finally admitted to myself that I was wasting my time.
This book deals with Eve and her faces only as a background to the author's desire to condemn the doctor who admittedly took advantage of her. There's a really interesting story there , but it gets bogged down in endless (it seems) criticism of the doctor's methods and looong descriptions of what the author would have done better. Way too many letters included between the doctor and various people involved but probably not central to the plot.
I admit that attempts to plump up a book and to insert unnecessary content to the story to add length is one of my pet peeves. I also hate it when an author uses a book to endlessly tell how much smarter he/she is to the actual subjects of the book.
Both of those things are very abundant in this book.
I made it about a third of the book before I finally admitted to myself that I was wasting my time.
September 10, 2023
I had never heard of The Three Faces of Eve before this book. I found the information interesting in this book, I just wish it was presented with a little less bias. It was obvious how the author felt and when I'm reading books like these, I want to be able to read the facts and then develop my own opinion.
March 21, 2017
If You Are A Student
If you are a college student studying this field the book is quite informative, otherwise it is as boring as all heck.
If you are a college student studying this field the book is quite informative, otherwise it is as boring as all heck.
March 5, 2019
Awesome book I Love it
December 28, 2025
Aunque su investigación es valiosísima para darle voz a aquellas partes que Chris no se atrevió a contar en su momento, no le doy 5 estrellas por dos razones principales: 1) su prosa crítica hace mucho uso del sarcasmo y de pronto es cansado que se salga del tema cuando repite que él hubiera hecho un mejor trabajo y 2) de pronto se siente que patologiza la multiplicidad, como si no fuera posible que Chris pudiera incluso seguir siendo múltiple pero con una vida plena y con sentido (un error que Chris cometió hasta que conoció la historia de Truddi).
Es un gran trabajo, su prosa es fácil de leer, y entiendo que esta es la forma de ser y de hablar de Colin Ross pero tal vez le falta una pulida a su estilo en escrito, porque escribe exactamente como habla (yo lo estoy haciendo aquí, pero esto no es un libro, es una reseña).
Es un gran trabajo, su prosa es fácil de leer, y entiendo que esta es la forma de ser y de hablar de Colin Ross pero tal vez le falta una pulida a su estilo en escrito, porque escribe exactamente como habla (yo lo estoy haciendo aquí, pero esto no es un libro, es una reseña).
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