From the author: Who is a psychologist and what does he do? It would seem a simple question with a simple answer. But when I sat down to write this article, it was not so easy to give a quick and unambiguous answer. In this article I want to reflect on the role of a specialist psychologist who provides individual psychological counseling. Who is a psychologist? In everyday relationships, this profession is not endowed with any kind of roles. We all understand the professions, say, driver, salesman, builder. However, what kind of profession a psychologist is is not really clear, and this misunderstanding gives rise to a lot of fantasies about this profession. I’ll try to give examples of what a psychologist is not. I often hear the word “treat” from people, that is, a psychologist is mistaken for a doctor. What should the doctor do? The doctor must give the patient the correct diagnosis and prescribe adequate treatment, including medication. A psychologist does not make diagnoses and does not “prescribe” valuable advice and magic pills. Sometimes people come to a psychologist for valuable advice and perceive his words as the only correct truth, that is, they perceive him as a kind of authority or expert. But a psychologist is not an expert in the lives of his clients. Sometimes clients want a psychologist to teach them how to live, how to build relationships with themselves and other people, that is, to become a kind of teacher. What is required from a teacher? The teacher explains the material, gives homework, then checks completion and grades. The psychologist, on the other hand, does not evaluate the client’s life and actions, does not present to him theories and his own thoughts related to psychology. Is a psychologist a wise, good person who expresses his thoughts intelligently and competently and gives simple answers to most questions? For example, whether you should get a divorce or not, quit your job or not, and in general, what kind of person you need to be. Such people can be classified as so-called “everyday” psychologists, but not professionals. Also, some developing people who begin to pour out a cornucopia of psychological terms and thoughts after they have read books on popular psychology and attended several similar trainings are also not psychologists. So, if the psychologist is not a doctor, not a teacher, not an authority, not smart buddy, then who is he? I’ll give an example of one definition that I like: a psychologist is a specialist with certain personal characteristics, a certain level of theoretical and practical training, who knows certain methods, techniques for effectively providing psychological assistance. When they tell me about a specialist, for example, an electrician, I myself am not a specialist in In this case, I roughly understand what he can do, and in what case I can turn to him. What is a psychologist an expert in? In a narrow sense, a psychologist is a specialist capable of providing psychological assistance. To move on to actual help, you need to answer the following question - what does a psychologist actually work with? Most specialists in other industries work with completely material objects that can be touched, measured, and performed in some way. And what a psychologist works with is the psyche, something intangible (at least in the scientific reality we are familiar with). According to the definitions given in various dictionaries, Psyche (from the Greek psychikós - mental): - a form of reflection by a person of objective reality; - mental organization, mental disposition; the state of the nervous system; - a set of sensations, ideas, feelings, thoughts of a person. That is, a psychologist is a person who works with the internal reality of another person. It is important to point out here that the psychologist works with healthy people. Other specialists, psychiatrists, work with the internal reality of mentally ill people. A psychologist, as a specialist, works with the intangible, but at the same time so real content of a person’s internal and external world: experiences, thoughts, feelings, emotions, beliefs,.