Does meta-analytic evidence support Inter-identity amnesia in dissociative identity disorder? A commentary and corrected analysis for Beker et al. (2024).

In individuals with dissociative identity disorder (DID), a key question is whether individuals in one identity state can access memories formed while being in another identity state. Beker and colleagues (2024) addressed this through a systematic review and four meta-analyses. While the review and two meta-analyses suggested memory transfer between identities, the other two meta-analyses appeared to support inter-identity amnesia. We argue that four systematic errors may explain the conflicting conclusions, including the lack of a control group, inappropriate hypotheses to establish whether amnesia is present, inconsistencies and calculation errors, and problematic reasoning regarding case data versus group-level statistics. In our meta-analyses we corrected for these errors and the results are consistent with the narrative results: both support memory transfer between identities, despite the self-reported inter-identity amnesia in individuals with DID.