 The temporal structure that accounts for pre-reflective self-awareness is also the structural feature that accounts for the limitations imposed on reflective self-consciousness. Reflective self-consciousness yields knowledge of pre-reflective subjectivity that is always after the fact. Reflective self-consciousness, which takes pre-reflective experience as its object, is itself (like any conscious experience) characterized by the same temporal structure. In principle, however, the retentional-impressional-protentional structure of reflection cannot overlay the retentional-impressional-protentional structure of pre-reflective experience in complete simultaneity. There is always a slight delay between reflection and the pre-reflective object of reflection. One might say that the pre-reflective experience must first be there if I am to turn my reflective attention to it and make it an object of reflection. Husserl writes: “When I say I, I grasp myself in a simple reflection. But this self-experience [Selbsterfahrung] is like every experience [Erfahrung], and in particular every perception, a mere directing myself towards something that was already there for me, that was already conscious, but not thematically experienced, not noticed” (Husserl 1973b, 492–493). This delay is one of the reasons why there remains a difference or distance between the reflecting subject and the reflected object, even though the reflected object is my own experience. As a reflecting subject, I never fully coincide with myself.