Self-consciousness is obviously a reflexive, i.e. mirrored process.Comparable to the peculiarity of very small children of speaking of themselves as “I” only when they recognize themselves in the mirror (cf. Jacques Lacan); before that they called themselves in the third person. Karl Marx put it like this, Petra or Peter need a Pauline or a Paul to be Petra or Peter at all (Marx, however, wrote the example in the masculine form only).