Based on a lecture by Professor Kim Joo-Hwan on September 12, 2026
We usually think of relationships as something that happens between two people who already exist independently: I am here, you are there, and then we begin to interact. In his lecture on self–other affirmation, Professor Kim Joo-Hwan asks us to reconsider that starting point. Our sense of who we are develops through relationships. Before we can say “This is me,” we have already been spoken to, cared for, responded to, and understood—or misunderstood—by others.
From this perspective, relationships are part of the ground from which the self emerges. This is what Professor Kim means by the primacy of relationships: communication helps shape the people who take part in it.
He illustrates this through a scene in Before Sunrise, in which Céline suggests that, if God exists, God might be found in the space between people. The image captures something central to the lecture: what happens between us becomes part of who we are.
Self–other affirmation begins here. Through forgiveness, compassion, love, acceptance, gratitude, and respect, we cultivate the quality of our relationships with ourselves and with others. Because relationships shape the self, these practices can also influence the person we are becoming.
Learning who we are through others
A child’s developing sense of self offers a concrete example. Long before a baby can describe an experience, a caregiver is already helping give it meaning: “Are you hungry?” “You’re sleepy, aren’t you?” “That was uncomfortable.” Through repeated exchanges, the child gradually learns to recognize feelings and make sense of an inner world.
Being loved and responded to also contributes to a sense of self-worth. The child learns about their own value through the experience of being treated as someone whose needs and feelings matter. Professor Kim emphasizes that social interaction is part of development itself, including the development of the brain.
This process continues throughout life. Parents, teachers, friends, colleagues, and even people we encounter briefly influence how we understand ourselves. Their words and responses become part of the image we carry of who we are.
Two related ideas help explain this. George Herbert Mead distinguished between the “I” and the “me,” emphasizing that the self develops through social interaction. The “me” incorporates attitudes and expectations learned from others; his concept of the generalized other describes the broader social perspective we learn to take toward ourselves.
Charles Horton Cooley’s looking-glass self offers a related image: we come to understand ourselves partly through how we imagine other people see us. A physical mirror reflects our appearance. Other people provide a different kind of reflection, helping shape the person we believe ourselves to be.
Repeatedly being treated as capable, valued, or worthy of respect can influence our self-image. Repeated dismissal can leave its mark as well. Communication has power because its effects can become part of our ongoing relationship with ourselves.
The relationship we carry within
As we grow older, communication continues within us. We respond to our own mistakes, interpret our experiences, and tell ourselves what those experiences mean. An external exchange may last only a moment, while the inner conversation it sets in motion continues long afterward.
This is why Professor Kim places inner communication at the center of meditation. Meditation can help us notice the self we have developed and intentionally cultivate how we relate to it.
The six practices of self–other affirmation begin inwardly. Self-forgiveness means learning to respond to our mistakes with forgiveness. Self-compassion means meeting suffering with care. Love, acceptance, gratitude, and respect likewise become ways of treating ourselves in everyday life.
These practices gain meaning through repetition. How do I speak to myself when I fall short? Can I acknowledge difficulty without turning it into a judgment about my worth? Can I treat myself with the respect I hope to receive from others?
Professor Kim compares this process to sculpting. A sculptor gradually works a block of marble into a form. In a similar way, we can examine inherited judgments, unnecessary assumptions, and habitual self-criticism, then keep refining the way we relate to ourselves.
The guiding question becomes: What kind of person am I cultivating through the way I communicate?
As that inner relationship changes, our responses to others may change too. Practicing forgiveness toward ourselves can make forgiveness more available in our relationships. Learning to meet our own pain with compassion can help us recognize the pain of another person.
Why perception enters the discussion
At this point, Professor Kim introduces the Markov blanket and active inference. This may initially seem like a departure from self–other affirmation, but it extends the lecture’s central question: how do we come to experience ourselves and the world?
The Markov blanket provides a way of describing the relationship between a system and its environment. It consists of sensory and active states that mediate between internal and external states. Sensory states are involved in receiving information; active states are involved in acting on the environment.
Within the active inference framework, perception involves interpreting sensory information and continually updating that interpretation. Suppose we see an object and think, “That’s an apple.” We can look more closely, feel its weight and texture, smell it, or take a bite. Information from several senses helps us refine our judgment. Action also contributes to perception: picking up the apple or tasting it changes the information available to us.
Other people contribute to this process too. We ask whether they see what we see, compare interpretations, and learn words that allow us to share experience. When a child points and says, “Mom, an apple!” the child is naming something while also inviting the caregiver to attend to it together.
The connection to self–other affirmation lies in this ongoing exchange. Professor Kim uses the model to emphasize that our experience takes shape through interaction with the world. Our understanding of ourselves likewise develops through communication with others and through the interpretations we repeat internally.
The model does not by itself establish the benefits of forgiveness or compassion. It helps explain why Professor Kim turns to communication: our experience of reality, including our sense of who we are, is continually interpreted, shared, and revised.
Stories—and experiences beyond words
Much of this interpretation takes the form of stories. We label what we see, explain what happened, and decide what an event means about us. Language helps organize experience, and language itself is something we learn from other people.
Professor Kim describes the experiencing self as the self that lives through events and turns them into stories. As those stories accumulate in episodic memory, they contribute to the remembering self—the continuing sense of “me” that he calls the ego.
This helps explain why habits of inner communication matter. The way we repeatedly interpret an experience can become part of the story we carry about ourselves. Self–other affirmation offers a way to make those interpretations more forgiving, compassionate, and respectful while still acknowledging what happened.
Yet experience does not always need to become a story. Music, visual art, and nature can draw us into something before we put it into words. We can hear a melody, encounter a painting, or look at white clouds against a blue sky without immediately explaining the experience.
Professor Kim suggests that constant labeling can interrupt this kind of attention. For a moment, we can let the sky be the sky, or listen to music without deciding what every sound means. There may be a feeling of awe—a sense of openness that leaves us almost speechless.
He connects this quality of attention with love and respect. Another person can be encountered with something of the wonder we feel before a beautiful landscape. We become more available to their presence, with less need to evaluate or describe everything about them.
Finding connection through movement
Professor Kim describes experiencing this openness while practicing Tai Chi in a park by the Han River during the pandemic. The whole environment began to feel lovable. His usual sense of a firm boundary between himself and his surroundings seemed to soften, bringing a feeling of connection, freedom, and love.
He describes a related experience in Zone 2 running. Running meditation means attending to the state of running itself: the transfer of weight from one foot to the other, the rhythm of breathing, and the sensation of moving.
Attention settles into the experience. There is no need, in that moment, to turn every step into progress toward a target. Movement can become a way of being present, with a growing sense of ease and connection to the world.
This brings the lecture back to self–other affirmation. Forgiveness, compassion, love, acceptance, gratitude, and respect may become more available when we feel settled and connected. Breathing, meditation, and attentive movement can help create the conditions in which those ways of relating emerge.
The lecture returns, finally, to the relationship we carry within. Our conversations with others help shape us, and so do the conversations we continue with ourselves. Each time we respond to a mistake with forgiveness, to pain with compassion, or to our own existence with respect, we contribute to the person we are becoming.
Self–other affirmation gives this everyday process a direction. It invites us to cultivate, again and again, a way of relating that allows both ourselves and others to be met with care.
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