The gap that separates you from others is more readily negotiable than the one that separates you from yourself. The perils of the former are great enough, seductions, hostage taking etc., but fall short of the uncanny effects associated with the latter, as in the image of the doppelganger, or of the anxiety of freedom, of the revelation of the artificial character of the structures maintaining your identity. Language use is largely designed it seems to facilitate accommodations with the other, even if and when these exceed the limits of what is comfortable, and appears to be ill-suited to the deepening self-knowledge. Instead you gain functional self-knowledge through mutual interactions, which means in some degree enacting what otherwise seem impossible, namely sharing the same thoughts with others as if your minds are connected. Proposed neural links, for example, are likely to reveal how basically familiar other minds are, since such links will only intensify and speed up what already happens in intimate conversation or art. Courage and honesty are surely required but the rewards are immediate in the form of a lessening of loneliness and estrangement, expansion of sense of self. Effects of alterity are merely challenges to be overcome except when that alterity is deep within the subject.