Every now and then, you read in the papers about a person who has “forgotten” who he is. He remembers nobody and nothing from his past, not even his name. We say this person is suffering from amnesia.

We all get emotionally upset from time to time. We feel hurt, angry, disappointed or frightened for one reason or another. When we feel such emotional pain, we want to do something about it.

For example, a simple way of dealing with it is to cry, or blush, or break out in a cold sweat. In fact, these reactions happen without our control. They are considered normal reactions, since practically everyone has them.

But a person may react to emotional stress and pain in another way. Instead of facing the problems that caused him to be upset, he tries to act in such a way that he won’t feel the anxiety. He “runs away” from it. He “protects” himself in this way from emotional pain.

One form of this reaction is amnesia. A person simply acts as if all those things which bothered and upset him so much didn’t really happen to him but to someone else! He “forgets” his anxiety.

In forgetting this, he also forgets a great many other things that were linked to his anxiety—including who he was! He just can’t remember anything about the past. But he may act quite normally about the present. He lives and works as another person, and may not attract any special attention.

Sometimes a person recovers from amnesia suddenly, of his own accord. In many cases, however, a person can be helped to recover by a psychiatrist. A curious thing is that people who recover from amnesia don’t remember events which took place while they were suffering from amnesia.