The paper draws firstly Ricoeur (1994) in supporting the primacy of reflective mediation over the immediate positing of the teacher as a subject, with particular reference to the learning process in teacher education. Secondly, the paper distinguishes between two major meanings of the process of identification - whether one equates 'identical' to its Latin origins as either 'ipse" or "idem'. There is a major conceptual difference between idem-identification as sameness, and ipse-identification as selfhood. We argue that the teacher is identifying her self with her teacher- self, her selfhood as a teacher, in a dynamic process of identification which never lets the teacher-self rest in sameness. We understand the teacher-self to be related to the learner-self in the act of teaching and learning. A teacher's selfhood is related not only to the learners of today and yesterday but to their world as it unfolds in the future. The paper relates reflective mediation to our work in different projects with pre-service and in-service teachers in schools and how it may be built into their work and relationship to learners and also to the organization of the school in its social context. Evidence is from dialogues between teachers, ways of documenting teaching processes and systematisation of ways of teaching.