Jane Austen’s Emma (post 2): Can a person love someone and not know it? How do I know it is possible and is related to multiple personality?

Can you both know something and not know it? It seems logically impossible. Although everyone has a little experience with that when they can’t remember a particular fact, but it comes back to them later, most people don’t have trouble accessing the fact that they love someone.

I learned that both knowing and not knowing is possible when I once asked a patient my usual screening question for multiple personality disorder—“Do you ever have memory gaps?”—and she answered, “No.” So I figured that she probably did not have it and moved on.

However, about six months later, in the course of my getting an update from her on her everyday life, I noted a discrepancy between something she mentioned and what she had told me previously. I was treating her in the psychiatric clinic of a hospital, and I assumed that she was getting all of her general medical care at the medical clinic of that same hospital (which was the hospital closest to where she lived), but now she made reference to attending the medical clinic at another hospital, and this took me by surprise. I asked for some verification, and she said that she kept the papers related to that treatment in a particular dresser drawer at home.

When I made an issue of her attending the other clinic as something she had never told me before, she became flustered [she was switching back to her regular personality], and then [her regular personality] said she knew nothing about going to a medical clinic at another hospital. But I told her to look in a particular dresser drawer when she got home and tell me next time what she found.

At the next appointment, she said that she had been surprised to find papers from another hospital in the drawer I had told her to look. And then I asked her the same question I had asked her six months before, “Do you ever have memory gaps?” But now she said that she did, and that she had been having them since childhood. “Well, why didn’t you tell me that when I asked you six months ago?” And I’ll never forget her answer:

“I knew, but I didn’t know.” She knew it sounded ridiculous, but that was her truth.