The Final Face of Eve: By Evelyn Lancaster with James Poling. (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co. Pp. 290.)

This is an interesting, racily told autobiographical story of a woman who suffered from such a severely split ego that she was able to function as two apparently separate, opposite, and alternating personalities. So far did the process of dissociation go that there seemed to be two persons, the moral Eve White, knowing nothing of the superficially hedonistic, psychopathic Eve Black. In the course of psychotherapy, which seems to have been of a highly eclectic kind, a third personality appeared, that of Jane, who, though somewhat false, was better orientated towards reality. Finally the story ends with an integration of the three personality patterns with a truer, better balanced, and indeed more human figure.

The therapists' method of effecting a recovery appears to have been a manipulated rather than a fully interpreted transference, bringing into consciousness some of the childhood traumata, and providing a tolerant understanding doctor-patient interpersonal relationship which enabled the patient to make steps in maturation which hitherto had been impossible for her.

From a psycho-analytic viewpoint one wonders what all the fuss is about (though it makes a good story) because normally one would expect such a problem in such a patient to be resolved by psycho-analysis, and in fact it may well be a pity that the patient did not have analysis rather than psychotherapy.