A while ago, I read Gisèle Pelicot’s extraordinary memoir A Hymn to Life, and it left me in a deeply reflective mood. It is easy to sensationalise her story: A woman was drugged by her husband and raped by dozens of men whom he had explicitly invited to do so. The story in itself is harrowing enough to warrant a book. But what surprised and impressed me about the book was not the story. It was Gisèle – her resilience, her clarity, but most of all, her depth of thought and her desire to understand.
Rather than turning away from the trauma, as many other victims of crime might understandably do, she turned towards it. She dove deeply into her childhood, as well as that of her ex-husband, following a thread that might explain why they had been so attracted to each other in the first place. What it was in their respective stories that brought them together, and how their relationship could grow into what it eventually became. She questioned how, despite the symptoms she developed as a result of the rapes, she had never once suspected him. And, at the end of the book, she said that she was planning to visit him and talk to him, because there were still so many questions she sought answers to.
One of the things I reflected on after reading Gisèle’s story was whether we can ever really know another person – and what this even means. Evidently, as in her case, you can be married to a person for fifty years and not know their darkest secrets. It reminded me of the story of serial killer Ted Bundy, whose fiancée lived with him for years while he was going out at night to rape and murder young women, then coming home as though nothing had happened. Although she eventually became suspicious and reported him to the police, for years she had no idea what he was doing.
These, of course, are extreme and rare cases. But what about the more mundane ones, like husbands who visit prostitutes with children’s buggies in their cars? Women who know their children were fathered by a lover yet tell their husbands nothing about it? Or, more ordinarily still, someone who has been unhappy in their marriage for years but has never told their spouse? A mother who secretly regrets having children? A person who carries an entire inner life that those closest to them know almost nothing about?
And so, what does knowing another person actually mean? What is it that we claim to know? Is it their behaviour, their personality as we perceive it, their values, habits and history? Do we know their thoughts, their fears, their desires and compulsions, the stories they tell themselves when no one else is listening? And how much of what we think we know about another person is actually what they have chosen to show us?
And that brings me even deeper into the inquiry: How much do we actually know ourselves?
Perhaps not as much as we’d like to think. How often do we act in ways we can’t really explain to ourselves, let alone to others? How often is our behaviour driven by an old survival mechanism, developed unconsciously in childhood and still operating decades later? How often do we act contrary to our own beliefs and convictions? Or discover, sometimes with considerable surprise, that the person we thought we were is not quite the person we turn out to be?
I am pretty sure that Dominique Pelicot is, retrospectively, as mystified by what he did to his wife as she is. One of the experts who assessed him described his personality as being like a “partitioned computer disk”: the ordinary husband and father existed alongside the man who emerged at night, apparently without one part fully confronting the other. Another striking observation in the book was that therapy would be difficult for someone like Pelicot precisely because it requires a capacity for self-reflection that he appeared to lack. He could describe what he had done, but understanding why he had done it was another matter entirely.
And that is where the ancient Greek maxim “Know thyself” comes in. The philosopher Socrates taught that true wisdom begins with recognising how little we truly understand about ourselves. He also believed that if we knew what was good, we would do what is good. Self-examination was a means of aligning our actions with justice, truth and reason.
But there was a crucial piece missing from this – one the psychiatrist C. G. Jung saw clearly. And that is the Shadow.
Jung believed that knowing ourselves required looking deep into the unconscious mind, specifically at the parts of ourselves we try to hide or ignore. The Shadow consists of repressed desires, weaknesses and instincts that the conscious mind rejects. Jung argued that until we acknowledge our shadow, it can exert enormous power over our lives. Apply this to Dominique Pelicot, and we can begin to glimpse how desires relegated to a hidden part of himself came to exert such extraordinary power over his behaviour.
Jung argued further that to become a whole, fully realised human being, we must bring the unconscious into the light, accepting both the admirable and darker aspects of ourselves to find true psychological balance.
This is, of course, a wonderful concept – if every one of us were inclined to embark on psychotherapy, or at least introspection. But in order to do that, we first have to know that such possibilities exist. Many people don’t, for all sorts of reasons. Society does not exactly teach us to examine the unconscious forces that drive our behaviour, and it is only in recent years that trauma awareness has become more widespread. What people have always done, and what many of us still do now – just watch shows like Love Is Blind for evidence of that! – is look for a partner who will somehow soothe, regulate or even heal what remains unresolved within us.
And the result is often that people can be married to each other for decades without fully knowing each other. They may know each other’s habits, rhythms, likes and dislikes – but not each other’s inner worlds, darkest secrets or deepest desires. Precisely because their own inner worlds remain largely unexamined.
So can we ever really know another person? I don’t think so. Not unless that person knows themselves deeply and chooses to share their inner world with complete authenticity and transparency. And even then, the picture can never be complete. Blind spots remain. Hidden aspects of ourselves continue to emerge, sometimes throughout the rest of our lives.
The best we can do, if that is our inclination, is to get to know ourselves as deeply as we can – through self-reflection, introspection, meditation, dream analysis, journalling, shadow work, therapy and the many other paths available. The better we know ourselves, the more authentically we can reveal ourselves to others. But greater self-knowledge can also help us read other people more clearly, by making us sensitive to what lies beneath the surface. And with that comes greater discernment: an ability to recognise what or who is authentic, and what merely presents itself as such.
Perhaps this is part of what Gisèle Pelicot is doing now: looking back over fifty years of marriage with new eyes, following the threads she could not see at the time, and trying to understand not only the man she married, but also the woman who married him.
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You might be interested in reading a related post: https://sriladevi.com/2026/07/28/who-sees-your-blind-spots/