Description:
Alfonso Martinez-Taboas reported on two corroborated cases of repressed and recovered memories that he observed in patients with Dissociative Identity Disorder during his clinical practice in Puerto Rico. The second is the case of Evelyn, who reported when prompted at the start of treatment that she did not have any memories of abuse in her childhood. During individual family member interviews, however, her sister indicated that she and Evelyn had been repeated sexually abused by their father as children, and that "I had never talked about that with Evelyn. I always supposed that she knows." Martinez-Taboas did not share this information with Evelyn until she began to uncover memories of abuse on her own many months later. "In this particular case I decided to restrain myself from sharing this information with Evelyn and the other hospital therapists. I wanted to know if some alter identity eventually came forth with that type of information. I was, without knowing it, trying to obtain an answer to the current debate about repressed memories" (Martinez-Taboas 1996).