From the author: The original interview is on the website: Interview with Dmitry Basov about psychotherapyCorrespondent: Dmitry, hello! Dmitry: Hello! K: ​​You are a professional psychologist, family psychotherapist. Please tell our readers about what psychological help is and how it is provided. And what do the services of a psychologist include? D: Psychological assistance is a very broad concept and a lot of things can be included there. I will tell you about what I do in my practice. These are two main directions: psychological consultations and psychotherapy. K: Please tell me, how do psychological consultations differ from psychotherapy? D: Consultations with a psychologist, as a rule, are aimed at understanding the specific problem situation with which the client came and helping him see various exit options, indicating their consequences. For a psychologically healthy and prosperous person, this is usually enough. A personally mature person makes a choice, takes responsibility for it and begins to act. If we talk about psychotherapy, then, unlike consultations with a psychologist, this is a more in-depth and lengthy process. The main task of psychotherapy is to create conditions for awareness of unconscious causes, problems and changes in the quality of life in the context of the client’s request. In psychotherapy, a complete history is collected from the moment of conception, because all this affects our lives, our actions and emotions, our relationships. When the basic semantics of the problem becomes clear, psychotherapy creates conditions for working through those early childhood fixations, emotions and situations that are reflected in the problems that are relevant to the client now. Thanks to the new model of relationships that develops in transference, the client learns to build his relationships with people around him in a new way and react differently to what is happening around him. K: Dmitry, please tell me, what is transference in psychotherapy? D: Transference is psychoanalytic term. Each of us has a certain algorithm by which we build relationships with people around us. This algorithm is laid down in early childhood in relationships with parents. For example, one child, when he wants and cannot get something from his mother, he begins to demand it and gets angry, while the other begins to be offended. Over time, this becomes a character trait. When a client comes to a psychologist, he begins to maintain a relationship with him in exactly the same way as it was in his life, i.e. transfers his problematic relationship to the psychologist and begins, as if without realizing it, to see in the psychologist his mother or father, with whom these problematic relationships were. Here the psychologist’s task is to show the client his transference and his projections and help him reshape the current relationship with him so that they are comfortable for the client, as well as give feedback about how the person next to him feels. K: Dmitry, You talk about relationships all the time, but what about other problems, such as depression or psychosomatics? D: Regarding this, I can say the following: all human problems are caused by a violation of some kind of relationship. Here it is important to understand the term RELATIONSHIP broadly: attitude towards oneself, towards people, towards the world, towards God, towards one’s character, towards one’s work, towards loved ones, towards parents, towards our ancestors who are no longer alive... The totality of these relationships shapes our character , our emotions and our behavior patterns. Only what is important here is not the attitude that we are aware of and believe that we love and value everyone, but the attitude that is hidden in the depths of our soul, in the unconscious and manifests itself in slips of the tongue, dreams, repressed feelings, fantasies. When this deep-seated attitude changes, the quality of our life also changes. K: How long does psychotherapy take? D: If we talk about one consultation, then it is usually 50 minutes, sometimes a little more if we are talking about family consultation K: A how long does it usually take?psychotherapy, how many consultations do you need to change something in your life? D: Clients usually try to ask this question over the phone or at the first consultation. Everything here is individual and there is no clear answer to this question. It all depends on the complexity of the problem or situation the client comes with and what he wants in the end. If a person comes to a consultation with a psychologist to simply understand the situation and calm down, without changing anything in his life, then several consultations are enough. If a client requests psychotherapy that he would like to change something in his life, then usually during the first 5–7 consultations we explore what is behind this or that life situation, look for the unconscious reasons for what is happening, and collect a detailed anamnesis. And only after this is it possible to talk about the strategy of psychotherapy and approximately imagine how long it may take to start the process of change. As a rule, deep internal changes appear 3–4 months after the start of psychotherapy. Of course, here a lot depends on the motivation of the client himself, on his willingness to work on himself and change something in his life. K: Dmitry, you are talking about deep internal changes, could you explain what this is? D: All psychotherapy is divided into 2 directions: 1- symptomatic and 2- pathogenetic. Symptomatic psychotherapy is aimed at relieving specific symptoms without any personal changes. But, unfortunately, the results of such work, if the cause has not been worked out, turn out to be very short-term and often the symptoms return, or one symptom is replaced by another, and sometimes several. Pathogenetic psychotherapy is aimed at understanding and working through the causes of emerging problems. She works not with the problem (symptom) but with the client’s personality, with his system of relationships, character, feelings and behavior patterns. Thanks to this, during such psychotherapy, not only the problem with which the client sought help is solved, but also the quality of his life as a whole improves. More energy appears, relationships with significant people begin to develop differently, peace and satisfaction come into life. Profound changes seem to emerge from within. A person begins to notice that if before he was offended or angry, now he is calm. If earlier he was inclined to avoid conflicts, give in or break off relationships, now he can calmly defend his position. This is worth a lot and significantly improves the quality of life. K: I understand that in psychotherapy everything is very individual, but how long does it take you to work with a client on average? D: The average duration of psychotherapy is like the average temperature in a hospital. Some people work on themselves for six months, some for a year, others need two or three years. K: That’s a very long time! D: Yes, it’s not fast! But if you look at it from the other side, it's not that long. In our country, unfortunately, people seek professional help very late. They often live with the problem for more than 10 years. I’ll give here a small example from my practice: a woman at the age of 30 came to me for psychotherapy with the problem that she had never had a long-term relationship with men, and she would like to start a family. From the family history, it became clear that the work would not be quick. She was raised by a rather despotic and emotionally cold mother, and she did not know her father at that time. She was a fairly smart woman (PhD). Psychotherapy took two and a half years, and she went 2 and sometimes 3 times a week. During this time, she was able to separate (separate) from her mother and begin renting her own place (she decided to do this after 6 months of therapy). During this time, she was able to find her genetic father and begin to communicate with him, work through her fear of men and resentment towards them. Only in the 11th month of therapy did she begin to have relationships with men, and to meet the man whom she could love withwith whom she began to live together and run a common household, she was able to do so only 2 years after the start of psychotherapy. And another six months were spent working on their relationship. In my opinion, these are very good and quick results, considering that the problem developed over 30 years of life and 9 months of pregnancy, when her parents were divorcing. Of course, here we must pay tribute to the client herself, who, despite the difficulties and resistance that arose when working through painful topics and experiences, continued to go to psychotherapy and discuss everything that she felt and what was happening to her. The fate of a person is a complex question and it is difficult to say how her fate would have developed without psychotherapy, but the psychological prognosis, based on her anamnesis, was as follows: she would have lived her whole life in conflicts with her mother, never letting a man into her life. life. When we discussed her changes at the end of psychotherapy, she herself said that, most likely, everything would have been the same if she had not decided to undergo psychotherapy. K: Yes, this is impressive! Dependence on parents in our country is a fairly common problem. What can you advise to those people who live in a similar situation in other cities and do not have the opportunity to live in Moscow and attend sessions regularly? D: Modern psychotherapy does not give advice or answer questions. She asks them! All the answers are in the client's head. The task of the psychotherapist is to ask questions with the help of which the client himself can understand what is happening in his life, why it is so and what to do about it. And most importantly, the psychotherapist creates a safe space and conditions in which the client can begin to change. As for out-of-town clients, now there is Skype, although I don’t really like this form of work. I prefer to work with the client “live”. Therefore, for out-of-town clients I have a form of work called a psychotherapeutic shuttle. Once every three months, a client comes to Moscow for a week, and we work 2–3 hours a day. Due to the intensity of work, changes in the client actively occur between shuttles. I consider this a fairly effective form of work and for a long time I myself underwent personal psychotherapy in this way in St. Petersburg. K: Dmitry, when you talk about psychotherapy, everything seems very easy and simple. Is it really? Are there difficult moments in your work? D: I try to look at life with optimism! And, of course, there are difficult moments, and in working with almost every client. There is no such thing as easy psychotherapy. People bring to psychotherapy the most difficult and painful experiences that are difficult for them to cope with alone. K: Tell us more about this. D: The main difficulty is that our psyche is structured in such a way that in order to free ourselves from something (for example, from painful emotional experiences or childhood psychotrauma) you need to relive it. And all these experiences begin to play out in the transference. This is absolutely normal. For example, if a client had a despotic and oppressive father as a child, then in the transference it will seem to him that the psychotherapist is putting pressure on him and forcing him to do something. This can cause feelings of helplessness, resentment, and suppressed anger. Often the client's unconscious provokes the therapist to behave the way his father behaved with him. And here it is very important to create such conditions so that the client does not hush up these feelings and does not suppress them in himself, but discusses them with a psychotherapist. Moreover, the client’s consciousness always resists the awareness of these feelings and touching them. Resistance arises and he often begins to act on these feelings (for example, avoiding the therapist or leaving therapy) rather than discussing and working through the transference. In order to overcome resistance and psychotherapy progresses effectively, there is a psychotherapeutic contract. This is a kind of frame that creates a safe space for work. K: Please tell us more about the psychotherapeutic contract. D: A contract is.