APPARENT AMNESIA ON EXPERIMENTAL MEMORY TESTS IN DISSOCIATIVE IDENTITY DISORDER - AN EXPLORATORY-STUDY

Dissociative identity disorder (DID; called multiple personality disor der in DSMIII-R) is a psychiatric condition in which two or more ident ity states recurrently take control of the person's behavior. A charac teristic feature of DID is the occurrence of apparently severe amnesti c symptoms. This paper is concerned with experimental research of memo ry function in DID and focuses on between-identity transfer of newly l earned neutral material. Previous studies on this subject are reviewed and a p:lot study with four subjects is described. This study is spec ifically concerned with the question whether self-reported asymmetries in between-identity transfer can be replicated on experimental memory tests. A secondary aim was to examine whether, in the absence of expl icit transfer, implicit transfer of information would occur. The resul ts showed that the apparent amnestic asymmetry for explicit informatio n was substantiated in the laboratory, although at least some leakage was present between the apparently amnestic identities. No evidence wa s found for better performance on implicit than on explicit memory tes ts in the apparently amnestic identities. In the discussion, parallels between apparent amnesia in DID and state-dependent memory are drawn, and the question of simulated amnesia is addressed. (C) 1998 Academic Press.