Corbett H. Thigpen

Dr. Corbett H. Thigpen (January 8, 1919 – March 19, 1999) was an American psychiatrist and co-author of the internationally popular, nonfictional book The Three Faces of Eve (1957).

Thigpen attended North Georgia State College and University and Mercer University. He graduated from the Medical College of Georgia (MCG) in Augusta in 1945.

Dr. Thigpen then entered into the private practice of psychiatry with Dr. Hervey M. Cleckley. Together, for much of the 1940s and most of the 1950s, they comprised the Departments of Psychiatry and Neurology at MCG, being then and there the only teachers in those fields, while also maintaining their private practice. Treatments they used included coma therapy, electroshock therapy (ECT), deep sleep therapy and lobotomy. Cleckley later wrote in The Mask of Sanity that "Dr. Corbett H. Thigpen, my medical associate of many years, has played a major part in the development and the revision of this work".

In 1957, with Dr. Cleckley, he co-authored the book The Three Faces of Eve, the first popular account of a case of multiple personalities (now called Dissociative Identity Disorder). They had previously published a research article on their patient 'Eve' in 1954, documenting the psychiatric sessions and how they came to view it as a case of 'multiple personality'. Such a diagnosis had fallen into relative disuse in psychiatry, but Thigpen and Cleckley felt they had identified a rare case; others have questioned the use of hypnosis and suggestion in creating some if not all of the characterization, and the diagnosis of Multiple Personality Disorder (now Dissociative Identity Disorder) remains controversial despite, or because of, upsurges in diagnoses in America.

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