A third barrier to the full knowing of another lies not in the one who shares but in the other, the knower, who must reverse the sharer's sequence and translate it back into image – the script the mind can read. It is wildly improbable that the receiver's image will match the sender's original mental image.

Translation error is compounded by bias error. We distort others by forcing into them our own preferred ideas and gestalts, a process Proust beautifully describes:

We pack the physical outline of the creature we see with all the ideas we already formed about him, and in the complete picture of him which we compose in our minds those ideas have certainly the principal place. In the end they come to fill out so completely the curve of his cheeks, to follow so exactly the line of his nose, they blend so harmoniously in the sound of his voice that these seem to be no more than a transparent envelope, so that each time we see the face or hear the voice it is our own ideas of him which we recognize and to which we listen.

Quoted from the book Love's Executioner and Other Tales of Psychotherapy by Irvin Yalom.