The developed ability to imitate is one of those key properties of the primate brain that ultimately provided the Homo Sapiens species with an overwhelming advantage over the rest of the animal world. In order to pass on a new skill genetically, the animal world requires several generations .The ability to learn through imitation has made it possible to pass on significantly more and qualitatively more complex information to the next generation of Home Sapiens at the rate of one generation, as well as to master a huge number of new skills and behaviors throughout life. In the first weeks of life, the baby unconsciously imitates the mother’s smile. A smile is not yet colored by emotion, so it looks more like a grimace. It is noticeable that the baby himself does not control the facial muscles; all movements occur against his will. He may even be frightened by what is happening to his face. A few more weeks pass, and now the smile becomes bright, real - during this time the baby, also “taking a closer look”, learned from his mother his first emotion - to reciprocately rejoice at the meeting. After a few more weeks, you can march in front of him - and the child will move his arms and legs enthusiastically and very similarly. In a few more months, he, also imitating, will begin to learn speech: “Say: Ma-ma.” “A-ah...” the baby will repeat ineptly. By mastering words, he will simultaneously master the concepts associated with them. Gradually, speech will become more complex - the child will acquire the skill of understanding and working with the meanings of sentences. He will learn not only to repeat, but also to create meaningful phrases, to voice his desires and ideas. This, in turn, means that he will master the most complex process - thinking. And he also masters it “closely” - having in front of him role models - his mother and father. From personal observations. Remember, in the famous cartoon, the reaction of the Kid, looking around the space occupied by Carlson: - Yes, but what will dad say? - What about our dad? - Wow! - the Kid shows a formidable fist. In another situation, the Kid says: - Yes, but what will mom say?.. - What will she say? - She will be upset... The child already has such accurate “virtual images” of his mother and father in his imagination he is able to make a fairly accurate forecast of their future reactions. I remember well how in childhood we, little viewers watching the cartoon, began to empathize with the Kid - our forecast was just as disappointing, because each of us also already had fairly accurate parental ones in our heads. images. From the very first moments of his life - still in the embryonic stage - a person feels his mother as his only external Universe, and she is such for him in a literal, physical sense. Having been born, the baby continues to feel her as the only Universe - but no longer in. physical, but figurative sense: she not only continues to feed him, she teaches him emotions, words, thoughts, skills. Growing up, the baby’s Universe expands - to the size of a house, yard, neighboring streets, city, country. So communication skills with his mother, with parents, becomes an experience of interaction with friends, colleagues, and society. A child joyfully accepted by his mother from birth will perceive all other manifestations of the big world, the Universe will also be happy, he will be open to communication, such people find the same productively minded people, the chances of such individuals achieving successful self-realization and taking a worthy place in life is very high. And, on the contrary, a childhood “charged” with conflicts will mean the same conflictual interpretation of all manifestations of the external world, a friendly joke from a colleague will be perceived as an insult, and even the most benevolent phrase can become a reason for a serious conflict Probably, each of us, unfortunately, has had the experience of encountering such people. From personal observations. The lack of parental attention received in childhood forces me to look for ways to make up for it - all my life. One of my first television projects was about theaters, it was a convenient excuse to visit the backstage of all the theaters of the city in which I then lived,get to know and communicate closely with the actors. The discovery that amazed me then was that many of them were mediocre actors who had only mastered the acting technique well. Subconsciously, many of them suspected their inadequacy - but did not admit it to themselves and looked for any reason - even the smallest role! - to be on stage again, to be the center of attention, even for a few seconds - even if only for a few spectators entering a provincial theater. If they managed to understand the origins of such attraction, to understand the parents who were unable to pay attention to them at one time - most likely their work would not be related to the stage and they could become excellent specialists in other professions - each of these actors was not a mediocre person, he was mediocre only as an actor. In different areas of psychology, there are the terms “father figure” and “mother figure”. These concepts were first introduced by S. Freud, who discovered that one of his clients was arguing not with him, but with his father, having carried out the so-called transfer of his disagreements with the psychotherapist. parent. Erich Fromm formulates the mother figure as a figure who gives the child the experience of unconditional love, and the father figure as a figure who gives the child the experience of achieving conditional love. It can be assumed that these are manifestations of those parental images that we are discussing in this article, but, as we can see, this phenomenon describes processes of a different order, although in its manifestations it echoes the phenomena described in the works of the mentioned and other specialists, and, in my opinion, completely explains these manifestations. Up to a certain age, children subconsciously and consciously imitate their parents: girls, when talking to dolls, will reproduce the words and intonations of their mothers, boys will imitate their fathers in their “boyish” affairs. In everyday life, you can notice that children, without realizing it, copy gait, posture, articulation and, of course, the behavior of their parents. This means that an even more complex process is taking place - the assimilation of the parents’ logic, their thinking and, therefore, to a large extent, their picture of the world. And the main essence of this process is obviously that each child, in such a subconscious and imitative way, adopts in a concentrated form the entire life experience of two adults - mother and father. In psychology there is a very precise term - internalization, that is, the adoption of external rules and guidelines as one’s own. In adolescence, the process of critical reflection on the experience gained begins - a period of extreme behavior begins, rejection of existing rules and norms of behavior. This period, on average, ends by the age of 22-25, after which the birth of one’s own experience occurs as a synthesis of two experiences - received from parents and acquired independently. After this comes a long period of self-realization, in which one’s own experience is of greatest importance. From personal observations. I saw times when people with long hair might not be allowed to go to school, jeans were an object of satire and involvement in the negative part of socialist society, and Komsomol leaders came to the disco and broke reels of recordings of the Beatles and Time Machine over their knees. Nowadays, a hairstyle can be of the most intricate type and color, jeans can easily be combined with a respectable jacket, and such a set can be seen even at a presidential reception, and the works of rock bands are performed by classical music orchestras in the most conservative music halls. Thus, new standards of social behavior and culture mastered by young people become the norm, and this happens within one generation. And if there had not been a constant struggle between the old and the new, then humanity would never have emerged from its primitive caves. I repeat - every child begins his life with subconscious learning through imitation, adopting the social skills and experience accumulated by his parents, which he later critically comprehends. and having enriched it with his own, he will pass it on in the language of subconscious reactions to his children - who will perceive them throughimitation and appropriate to themselves as methods of understanding and describing reality. This is an objective process determined by the structure of our brain and psyche, each of us possesses it. It is the ability to learn through imitation and reproduction of behavior, skills and social interaction observed in other people that has made it possible to transfer a huge amount of useful knowledge from generation to generation, and the ability has the property of unlimited scaling. Relatively speaking, having seen how one monkey hit an opponent with a stick, the whole flock will instantly master this technique, and the flock of rivals too. With the advent of speech, the ability to transmit and assimilate new knowledge provided the species with a non-competitive advantage over the rest of the animal world. From all this it follows that “virtual images” of parents are an integral part of a person’s inner “I”, his personality, and accompany him - whether he wants it or not - throughout his life. These images influence all decisions made by a person - both in the immediate, current situation, and in future scenarios predicted in the imagination. Now is the time to take a deeper look at this process. Each of the parents was a child. Learning and adopting life experience from your parents. Each of them was also a child and also went through the entire cycle of learning from their parents, critical thinking, enriching it with their own experience and passing on their experience to their children. And so - until, again, the conditional Adam and Eve. Thus, we can say that each child, being at the top of his ancestral pyramid, through his parents’ “virtual images” gains access to a colossal resource - two ancestral experiences of many generations, which are accumulated in each of the parents. It can be assumed with a high degree of certainty that this particular resource is our intuition or its fundamental basis. The “I” develops in close relationships with the images of parents. This means that parents give birth to a child twice - first as a physical body, and then as a person .What conclusions and hypotheses can we draw from this? Images of parents are integral parts of the child’s personality, his own “I” and remain so throughout his life; 2. images of parents, being part of the personality of an adult, are perceived by his child as the total experience of the parent and are inseparably included in the image of the parent created in his mind; 3. the image of a parent contains the total ancestral experience of the entire family of the parent; 4. the child’s internal conflict, caused by psychological trauma from the parent, partially or completely isolates the child’s own “I” from the birth experience of this parent - by rejecting the “bad” part of the parent, the child’s inner “I” will reject part of the parent’s image, and therefore part of the parent’s experience image; 5. after working through psychological trauma, a person’s inner “I” restores access to the parent’s birth experience. As an additional consequence, one more important circumstance must be understood. Modern practice of psychological consultations, as a rule, is focused on the relationship between the client and his parents, rarely going beyond this triangle. The phenomenon of the ancestral resource described in the article explains the need to cover relationships to the greatest possible depth - to the level of grandfathers, great-grandfathers and beyond. When investigating a conflict at the client-parent level, the client faces the need to transform his childhood grievances into relationships based on love, overcoming internal resistance - because childhood resentment, as a rule, arises as a child’s interpretation of adult manifestations into aggression against him. In this process, the client - an adult who has already grown from a traumatized child - still faces the need to enter into a relationship - even if it is work in the imagination - with a “bad mom” and a “bad dad”, positioning his “I” as “good”, but it is difficult for the victim to part with the offense - after all, this was his own way of loving himself, saving himself from it.traumatic situation. Often such a step requires admitting one’s own mistake, wrongness, this complicates the situation and if a person does not find the strength within himself, then he leaves the situation unresolved. If the relationship is extended to the level of grandparents and great-grandfathers, it is possible to explain the motives of the client’s parents through their childhood - by finding in it the prerequisites that formed the behavior of the parents, which traumatized the client’s childhood. The child “receives” the parents already in a “ready-made” form - mature adults. He has no experience of life at this age, and often understanding of parents occurs only after reaching the age of the parents, with obtaining comparable life experience. Let's say, it is difficult for a 20-year-old young man to explain the motives of his parents, who were 30-40 years old at the time of his birth. But if you “guide” him through the childhood period of his parents, i.e., through the age, the experience of which he himself has not forgotten, you can get a deep understanding and sincere empathy for the collisions that occurred in the childhood of his parents and formed traumatic patterns for him behavior. This technique evokes the client’s sympathy for his parents, helps to understand their motives and see in their actions not aggression, but a consequence of their difficult childhood. The effect is enhanced if the client’s knowledge of distant ancestors allows him to repeat the technique of “living childhood” in relation to grandfathers and great-grandfathers. The technique is especially effective if the realities of the ancestors’ childhood are correlated with historical conflicts - wars, repressions, dispossession, etc. With this approach, the client’s internal resistance is reduced, overcoming the internal conflict with parents and establishing relationships is much easier. The client’s inner “I” gains harmonious acceptance of parental images, cleared of grievances and conflicts, the personality becomes whole, self-esteem returns to the level of self-sufficiency - this is always reflected in relationships in the family, in personal life and in professional activities in the most positive way, the perception of the world becomes positive .From personal observations.Very often the root of some reactions of parents (touchiness, rationalization, inability to handle money) can be found in the childhood of their ancestors, who survived political repression and dispossession. People who have experienced severe injustice, deprivation of property and subsequent exile experience a similar set of dramatic feelings, withdraw into themselves, become immersed in fear and suspicion. It is obvious that children raised in such an atmosphere will inevitably receive similar childhood traumas, which will be copied by their children. This understanding debunks many established and popular mystical and esoteric positions, such as “unfavorable karma”, “ancestral curse”, “evil eye”, etc. Understanding the origins of the key - first - trauma often helps to find the shortest path to solving the client’s problems. In conclusion, I would like to move away from dry logic and move on to a more lively language of metaphors. Every time we find ourselves in a situation of choice - in a momentary situation or planning long-term scenarios, especially with a large “novelty coefficient”, a coefficient of unknown - we inevitably turn not only to our knowledge, but also to intuition. If our assumption is that the ancestral experience, concentrated in the parental experience, is the basis of our intuition, then it is obvious that the “right to vote” is involved in the choice of the option - “to go left or right”, who to be with, and, finally, who to be. and parental images – “inner mom” and “inner dad”. One of the ancestors was in a similar situation and, since the family continued to exist, chose the right decision. And ancestral memory can respond to the current situation and suggest a choice. In the case of unresolved childhood grievances and internal conflicts, parental images are fragmented - “mom is good”, “mom is bad”, “dad is good”, “dad is bad”. Thus, in situations of choice, the inner “I” has a relationship not with two agreed upon images that suggest the right decision, but with several, with some of which the “I” is in antagonism, and