For Gadamer, understanding moves between two different levels. One is the everyday ontological level in which there is a meeting between the familiar and the alien, between the known and the not-quite-expected. But understanding can also be a skill to be developed. This is the way in which we achieve good knowledge. In pedagogical terms, encountering the alien is the basis for self-formation, or bildung, originating in Hegel. But there is an ambiguity at the heart of bildung. The notion of encountering the alien runs together two different notions: (a) being pulled up short, as elaborated by Deborah Kerdeman; and (b) allowing oneself to be interrogated by the other, as described by Charles Taylor. And each of these has affective psychodynamic parallels in Jungian and Freudian psychology, the first in the notion of deflating hubris, and the second, in the reintegration of projection. The experiences of encountering the alien in these two forms can be extremely intense for university students and they constitute significant self-transformations.