I am conscious of myself and become myself only while revealing myself for
another, through another, and with the help of another. The most important acts
constituting self-consciousness are determined by a relationship toward another
consciousness. . . . The very being of man (both internal and external) is the
deepest communion. To be means to communicate . . . .To be means to be for
another, and through the other, for oneself. A person has no internal sovereign
territory, he is wholly and always on the boundary: looking inside himself, he
looks into the eyes of another or with the eyes of another . . . . I cannot manage
without another, I cannot become myself without another; I find myself in another
by finding another in myself.
--Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination