Summary

The 1957 film, The Three Faces of Eve, deals with a case based on a real woman’s mental illness and treatment. Presented as “Eve White” in the movie, she is initially a normal, reserved wife and mother, fairly typical of the era. To her husband’s shock, another personality emerges, and one completely in contrast to Eve White; “Eve Black” is wild and fun-loving. Later in the film, a third personality, that of the stable “Jane’, arrives on the scene and provides resolution to the fragmented whole.

There are, in the course of the film, melodramatic episodes. Eve’s husband, unaware of her illness, first is attracted to her “Eve Black” side, but that manifestation of personality is dangerous, and seeks to kill her own daughter. Then, in therapy, Eve is brought back to her childhood trauma of having to kiss her dead grandmother at a funeral, and the personality of “Jane” is then able to accept this and cohere the splintered psychological selves.

For its time, The Three Faces of Eve was a shocking and somewhat exploitative look at Dissociative Personality Disorder (DPD), simplifying this inherently complex problem in an entertainment genre. Nonetheless, the movie broke ground in acquainting the public with a very real and crippling form of mental illness.

Dissociative Personality Disorder

DPD goes under a variety of names, and is often referred to as Dissociative Identity Disorder or Multiple Personality Disorder. The illness is the same, however, and people are finally breaking free of a misconception this film helped to create: that “split personalities” and schizophrenia are one and the same. The public today is aware that schizophrenia is a highly complex and wide-ranging mental disorder that is usually not revealed through DPD.

In a sense, there is no way for a person to possess multiple personalities, as the single personality, even fragmented, must contain all the seemingly disparate others. Nonetheless, “personality” has a very specific meaning to the average mind, and is defined by identifiably consistent behaviors. Viewed in this manner, it is entirely possible that a person may exhibit multiple personalities.

The symptoms of DPD are, not unexpectedly, expressions of the illness itself. Typically, a person suffering from DPD exhibits behaviors so strikingly in contrast with how they are usually perceived that it appears as though someone else were present. This in turn provides a further insight into DPD, because it appears that the other, latent personalities are manufactured as coping mechanisms; the ordinary persona has suppressed elements of its being which require release, but are so either born from trauma and/or persistently repressed that only another, whole “person” can be permitted to express them.

As in the real-life case from which this film was derived, people with DPD rarely manifest so few and concrete personality types. The woman who inspired The Three Faces of Eve, in fact, asserted that she had twenty-six distinct personalities within her psyche, and most documented cases similarly run into dozens of personality manifestations which can be isolated as such. This is a logical operation for the mind to take, in terms of the nature of DPD; there is no rational strategy being executed by the mind, but an evolving means of coping. Thus do some personalities exert dominance for extended periods, then give way to newly emerging ones. The illness of DPD is one which is perpetually shifting to meet the perceived needs of the patient’s primary being.

Trauma of some kind is typically identified as a cause of DPD, since the illness is founded on factors of suppression. Anything too disagreeable or horrific, and usually in childhood, is not accepted by the conscious mind. Submerged, it eventually begins to manifest its impact by the developing of alternate personalities that can either deal with it, or take another, seemingly more effective, route of denial.

The Mental Health System Today

Perhaps the greatest strength of the modern mental health system lies in its acknowledgment of its limitations, in terms of both misguided history and the knowledge yet to be obtained. Fortunately, many forms of criminality once considered mere expressions of deviance or evil are now known to be dysfunctions of the brain, often created by chemical imbalances.

It is chilling today to realize that, not many decades ago, seriously ill people underwent routine, and nearly barbaric, lobotomies. The brain was, then, seen as the center of the problem, but the unconscionable solution was simply to cut sections of it out. Today, through, research, medications have been developed which can at least treat the most extreme cases of violent and/or delusional schizophrenia. As noted, there is as well a necessary understanding that there is much about mental illness only beginning to be uncovered.

“Eve’s” Illness

The film strongly suggests that the family pressure placed upon the young girl Eve to kiss her deceased grandmother was the sole impetus for her later illness. Moreover, “Jane”, in accepting this, is empowered to cohere all of Eve’s personalities. This is, as in the number of personalities, a neat, cinematic resolution to a complex problem. It is as well unsatisfying, even within the film.

There is a persistent sense that this single episode at the funeral could not have been as traumatic as it is made to be, were it not for other factors of her childhood. It seems that the young Eve must have existed in a harmful environment for some time, one marked by severe treatment, and that the funeral kiss was the culmination of this. Then, it is unreasonable to assign “blame” in many cases of DPD, as it is entirely possible that such disorders may be triggered by purely internal psychological factors.