Cognosce te ipsum - know thyself. (Latin-Russian dictionary winged phrases and expressions)
At the dawn of our era this Latin phrase was already in circulation. However, until now there is not the only possible method, using which people could learn and guaranteed to know yourself. People tried to know ourselves, turning to religion and philosophy, science and art, prose and poetry. And to some extent they succeeded, but only to some extent.
One of the conditions of the process of cognition itself are the people around the knower. Alone the possibility of self-knowledge is limited. In modern psychology there is the notion that personality is formed through social relations. It's rather paradoxical thing: the knowledge itself may not be in motion and concentration on itself, and the movement from itself, by itself, to people. Here reveals its essence is another truism that man is the measure of all. If man becomes the measure only himself, his equality with himself, he is doomed to walk in endless circles in search of himself. Reflected in other people, a person gets the opportunity to reveal itself in its manifestations, feelings, relationships, meanings. In a collision with something else, something greater than itself, the self have an opportunity to establish that it is inherent and what is not.
Another challenge of self-knowledge is filtering and correction of one's own countless reflections. The people around, though, and can be mirrors, but it is unlikely someone is a perfectly flat mirror. Therefore, man sees his qualities and manifestations with varying degrees of distortion. What serves as the filter to align its contours? Perhaps, the mind that estimates the possibility or impossibility of the existence of certain of their traits. And perhaps faith. If a person believes that he is the way himself think, so he's got to be. Another filter may be the desire. A passionate desire to be something or the other. Probably a combination of filters can be quite varied. Surely this combination is different for each person. And certainly in these filters can be failures that result in the submission of the person about himself may not match what it actually is what it actually is. And here again it is necessary the intervention of other people that could confirm or refute the emerging ideas of the person about himself.