Christine "Chris" Costner Sizemore (April 4, 1927 – July 24, 2016)[1] was an American woman who, in the 1950s, was diagnosed with multiple personality disorder, now known as a dissociative identity disorder. Her case, with a pseudonym used…
Christine "Chris" Costner Sizemore (April 4, 1927 – July 24, 2016)[1] was an American woman who, in the 1950s, was diagnosed with multiple personality disorder, now known as a dissociative identity disorder. Her case, with a pseudonym used, was depicted in the 1950s book The Three Faces of Eve, written by her psychiatrists, Corbett H. Thigpen and Hervey M. Cleckley, upon which a film that starred Joanne Woodward was based. She went public with her true identity in the 1970s.
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Sizemore was born Christine Costner on April 4, 1927, to parents Acie and Zueline Hastings Costner in Edgefield, South Carolina.
In accordance with then-current modes of thought on the disorder, Thigpen reported that Sizemore had developed multiple personalities as a result of her witnessing two deaths and a horrifying accident within three months as a small child. However, in Sizemore's own report, these traumatic incidents only triggered the evidencing of selves which were already present: "Despite authorities' claims to the contrary, my former alters were not fragments of my birth personality. They were entities, whole in their own rights, who coexisted with my birth personality before I was born. They were not me, but they remain intrinsically related to what it means to be me."
While The Three Faces of Eve was written by Thigpen and Cleckley with limited input from Sizemore, her later books I'm Eve (1977) and A Mind of My Own (1989) fill in details. Much earlier, in 1958, she had written Strangers in My Body: The Final Face of Eve, using the pseudonym of Evelyn Lancaster. According to psychiatrists who worked with her after she moved from South Carolina, Sizemore did not experience three selves but instead approximately 20. The doctors reported that her selves presented in groups of three at a time.
Sizemore reported 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, Sizemore went to Manhattan's Federal District Court to contest the contract. She accepted an out-of-court settlement, and no further films were made.
Sizemore's papers, covering 1952 through 1989, have been acquired by the Duke University Library. An overview of the collection and a summary of Sizemore's story are included on its website.
Sizemore was interviewed on the BBC News channel series Hardtalk on March 25, 2009.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_C...
