The phrase “know yourself and you know the world” must be made an epigraph to any psychology textbook so that a person who wants to be a psychologist constantly remembers that he must first know himself. And after that - try to understand your client and help him.
The ability that allows a person to know himself is called reflection.
The first meaning of reflection is revealed in the process of teaching psychology. Initially, any psychological theory can be understood only through an analysis of how this theory is reflected in a person’s own life. Without an understanding of how this happens to me, it is impossible to realize and fully understand how this happens in general.
The second meaning of reflection smoothly follows from the first: if I do not know myself, I do not know anyone. To understand a specific person, in the future - a client, you must first understand and feel how it happens with me. Reflection is a necessary basis for empathy; empathy, in turn, is a necessary basis for the effective work of a psychologist.
And the third, the most important and complex in terms of its mechanisms and consequences, is the meaning of reflection. With the help of reflection, the ability to understand what is happening to me, the psychologist is able to understand what is happening with the client, what is happening in the relationship with the client, is able to understand the reasons for what is happening and to separate the important from the secondary, to separate one’s from the other, to separate the professional from the personal.
To do its job well, any psychologist must necessarily grow in himself an inner observer, a subpersonality whose function is solely reflection, that is, the ability to see, feel, reflect those events that occur in the inner world and in the outer world.