I DVR’d the movie recently and apparently the recording cut off the ending. The last scene I watched was Eve in Dr. Luther’s office, remembering the names of all her teachers growing up. What happens after that?
I don’t remember specifics, just that the personalities integrated and the stable one took over. It was a happy ending.
SPOILER ALERTSPOILER ALERTHERE COMES THAT NASTY OL’ SPOILERSPOILER ALERTSPOILER ALERT
It was one of those psychologically over-over-simplified “Just discover the single incident that caused the trauma and the patient will experience immediate recovery” plots so common in movies of the mid-Twentieth Century. In the case of “Eve,” her ambivalence toward being made to kiss the funereal corpse of her grandmother was the catalyst.
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Sam, you didn’t need to write all that spoiler business. The request for a spoiler was right in the thread title!
Anyway what I’m looking for is details of what happened after the scene I mentioned, an elaboration on what **AuntiePam **wrote.
She was cured. Eve Black and Eve White were subsumed by Jane.
Yes, you didn’t miss much beyond the teacher naming scene. I think it’s just Jane riding off into the sunset in a convertable with her new husband and her daughter, with a voiceover by the psychiatrist about how she was fully cured and now was living happily ever after.
Kissing a corpse is yucky, but come on! ALL of her problems stemmed from that one incident?
Thanks for the info. And yeah I was expecting the traumatic incident to be more along the lines of sexual abuse…but I also realized this movie is from 1957, and I’m not sure how that would have flown with audiences.
Quick related side story…
The real Eve, Chris Costner Sizemore, spoke in front of my 9th grade psychology class in 1985. The father of one of my classmates was one of her publicists or attorneys at the time. Fascinating story and the Wikipedia article pretty much sums up what she told my class. However she went more in depth with her own story, the story of the real life Sybil, and others that suffer from dissociative identity disorder. She also talked about how mulitple personalities are reintegrated.
I’ve never seen the movie, but I’ve read the book it was based on, and there was a LOT of sexual abuse from the grandmother.
Which, while entertaining I’m sure, has little relationship to the real world since the whole multiple personalities thing in general and especially these cases have been soundly debunked.
limegreen, that makes a whole lot of sense given my suspicions. Severe childhood abuse seems to most often be the catalyst for dissociative identity disorder. If you’re interested in another example, there’s a book Switching Time by Richard Baer about a doctor who treated a woman with 17 personalities. She endured severe childhood sexual and physical abuse, and it’s a hard read, but fascinating (if you’re interested in that sort of thing heh).
There’s also When Rabbit Howls, by a woman who did not integrate. Another instance of extreme sexual abuse, beginning at the age of 2.