Dorothy Otnow Lewis

Dorothy Otnow Lewis is an American psychiatrist and author who has been an expert witness at a number of high-profile cases. She specializes in the study of violent individuals and people with Dissociative Identity Disorder, formerly known as Multiple Personality Disorder. Lewis has worked with death row inmates as well as other prison inmates convicted for crimes of passion and violence, and was the director of the DID clinic at Bellevue Hospital, associated with New York University in New York City. She is a professor of Psychiatry at Yale and New York University and is the author of Guilty by Reason of Insanity, a book she wrote based on research done with the help of neurologist Jonathan Pincus.

Lewis is a graduate of the Ethical Culture Fieldston School, Radcliffe College and Yale University School of Medicine. She has stated she originally went to medical school intending to become a Freudian psychoanalyst.

She was married to Melvin Lewis, a child psychiatrist and professor at Yale, who died in 2007. She has two children.

During her research Lewis concluded that most if not all of the inmates she worked with had been abused as children or had experienced or witnessed potentially traumatic events, including violence. She found that in most cases both the accused and the family members have been reluctant to discuss the abuse that happened in the past; in many cases she concluded that the inmates had blocked out the memories. In some cases she was able to find testimony to this abuse as well as corroborating evidence. The corroborating evidence often included scars said to be from the abuse, as well as hospital and criminal records potentially related to abuse. In many cases the hospital records of the abuse were attributed to other causes, often accidents; however the explanations often didn't match the injuries according to Lewis. She also found that the parents of these children often had the same problems as the children and concluded that they taught their behavior to the children. She argued that they often relied on excessive force to discipline their children and used it inconsistently, and that in many cases the children who received the strictest discipline became the most violent. In some cases these children found that if they told other adults about the abuse, which in some cases was very extreme, they found that adults didn't believe them because the stories were too bizarre.

...
Wikipedia