Christine "Chris" Costner-Sizemore (born April 4 1927) is a woman who in the 1950s was diagnosed with multiple personality disorder (MPD; now known as dissociative identity disorder). Her case was depicted in the book and film The Three Faces of Eve by her psychiatrists, Corbett H. Thigpen and Hervey M. Cleckley. She lived for many years in South Carolina. In accordance with then-current modes of thought on MPD, Thigpen reported that Costner-Sizemore had developed multiple personalities as a result of her witnessing two deaths and a horrifying accident within three months as a small child. She had the relatively rare MPD experience of seeing her selves as separate physical persons and would later state that she did not believe she had begun as a single person who had fragmented in response to nervous shock, but that her other personalities were there all along. While The Three Faces of Eve was written by Thigpen with little input from Costner-Sizemore, her later books I'm Eve and A Mind Of My Own fill in details that were overlooked or ignored by Thigpen. According to psychiatrists who worked with her after she left Thigpen, Costner-Sizemore did not experience three selves, but approximately twenty. The doctors reported that her selves presented in groups of three at a time; Thigpen's account had only covered one group. Costner-Sizemore reports feeling exploited and objectified by the media blitz surrounding the book and film. Upon discovering in 1988 that her legal rights to her own life story had been signed away to 20th Century Fox by Thigpen, Costner-Sizemore went to Manhattan's Federal District Court to contest the contract, and won.
References
- Costner-Sizemore, Chris, with Elen Pittillo, I'm Eve. Jove, 1978. ISBN 0385120621
- Costner-Sizemore, Chris, A Mind Of My Own. William Morrow, 1989. ISBN 0688081991
- Entertainment Tonight, interview with Costner-Sizemore and Bobbi Edricks, 1988. RealAudio stream here
