if you reflect a table that has a foreign key reference on itself to another table, that other table will be reflected as well, but at that point the second Table object is sitting inside the MetaData instance. to use it in a relation still requires that the related class is mapped, which requires having its table...so....yeah for any class you want to map you need to explicitly get a hold of the corresponding Table (or use ActiveMapper, or SqlSoup, which try to work around this step).