Cognitive linguistics, along with philosophy and psychology, is a scientific discipline for which the problems of thinking have a central, nuclear character. This area of ​​scientific knowledge arose in the 70s of the last century, and took organizational form in the form of various institutions in the next decade. It is based on the postulate of the unity of language and the mental organization of man. It is clear that the basic concept of this branch of linguistics is cognition. There are many definitions of “cognition.” Personally, I prefer the following: cognition is a mental action that “takes together the process of achieving knowledge (i.e. cognition) and its result (i.e. knowledge)” (T. Skrabtsova. “Cognitive Linguistics”, 2011.) One of the leading experts in the field of cognitive linguistics is the American scientist George Lakoff. As a student of the outstanding American linguist Noam Chomsky, the creator of the theory of generative (transformational) grammar (linguistics), he subsequently became his most consistent opponent. By the way, Noam Chomsky is not only the most quoted among living scientists, but one of the gurus of Western civilization. He's probably Stephen Hawking. There was also Umberto Eco, who recently left us... In his main works (J. Lakoff, M. Johnson. Metaphors by which we live, 2007; J. Lakoff. Women, fire and dangerous things, 2011) Lakoff not only described new models of cognition , but also set new horizons for the development of cognitive science. The first book lays the foundations of the conceptual theory of metaphor, the second is devoted to the processes of categorization of thinking, and it also further developed the theory of prototypes proposed by the American linguist Eleanor Rosch. For us, psychologists and psychotherapists, the greatest interest is that section of the scientific text of these books, in which the author compares the old model of thinking accepted in traditional linguistics with the new one, created not only by linguists, but also by specialists in other fields of humanities: philosophers, psychologists, logicians, semioticians and many others. Nevertheless, it was Lakoff who most clearly and consistently formulated and compared in the form of a distinction (distinction) the main ideas of these two approaches to thinking. Traditional approach // New approach Thinking is abstract and does not depend on a specific embodiment // Thinking is “embodied”, that is, determined by the “bodily experience” of a person. Thinking proceeds thanks to abstract symbols // Thinking figuratively and metaphorically. Thought is atomic, decomposable into components // Thought has the properties of a gestalt, indecomposable. Thinking is logical // Thinking is environmentally friendly (the functions of thinking depend on the general configuration of the conceptual system). From this comparison it is clear that metaphor is recognized as the key cognitive model in modern linguistics. In the linguistic and philological tradition, the phenomenon of metaphor has been known since ancient times, but only in the second half of the 20th century. There is a fundamental change in the presentation of this phenomenon of language: metaphor is considered not only as a rhetorical figure, but also as a fundamental cognitive mechanism that organizes our thoughts, formalizes judgments and structures language. It is thanks to metaphors and its most important function - nominative or naming - that not only objects, not only natural phenomena, but also much more receive their names. For example, bodily sensations and states (remember the “lump in the throat” and “panic attack” so beloved by many neurotics). Metaphor captures and records human experience, allows it to be appropriated and included in the existing Model of the World, ensuring its constant and continuous updating. By “gestalt” Lakoff understands the inclusion of sensory, emotional cognition in mental action, as well as the general orientation of the human psyche towards the completeness of the cognitive act, in.