The phrase "know yourself, and you will know the world" must be made an epigraph to any textbook on psychology, so that a person who wants to be a psychologist constantly remembers that first of all he must 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 understanding how it happens with me, it is impossible to realize and fully understand how it happens in general.
The second meaning of reflection flows smoothly from the first: if I don’t know myself, I don’t 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 foundation 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 its mechanisms and consequences, the meaning of reflection. With the help of reflection, the ability to understand what is happening to me now, 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 separate the important from the secondary, separate one's own from the other, separate the professional from the personal.
Any psychologist, in order to do his job well, must necessarily cultivate an internal observer, a subpersonality, the function of which is only reflection, that is, the ability to see, feel, reflect the events that occur in the inner world and in the outer world.
