One of the advantages (and disadvantages) of classifying is that it draws your awareness to things you might not have been aware of.
One classification of the self is as follows:
There is the self we know and others know
There is the self we know, but others don’t
There is the self that we do not know, but others do
And there is the self that no one knows!
The self we know and others know is quite clearly one that we all have agreement about.
The self we know but others don’t know is our secret self. This is the stuff we might foolishly put in our diary and then loose it!
The self we do not know but others do know, is probably the one we hear about when we have an argument. The other tells us things about us which we do not know and do not believe. They all include our little foibles and ways as well as our great qualities and our base ones.
Normally we don’t tell others about these things we know about them of which they are unaware. Freudians call some of these things reaction formation because the other takes a too extreme opposite view that we think they are hiding something. Yet they are quite unaware of this.
We do often not believe others when they tell us about these aspects of ourselves that we are unaware of.
The final category is those aspects of ourselves that no one is aware of! These are probably parts of our nature we keep extremely secret, even from ourselves. This is the area that depth psychologists like to explore. We know there are such aspects because we become aware of some of them during very deep and personal conversations. Because we discover things that no one knew about us, not even ourselves, we reason that there may be more of them.
Using these categories may help us become more aware of ourselves and others.