Psychotherapy as a specific human activity arose not from the moment of division of mental life into conscious and unconscious, but when the unconscious began to be assigned a special role in conscious life. For more than a century of history, the task of psychotherapy has virtually remained unchanged - to connect the conscious and unconscious in order to gain greater freedom. Since what we are not aware of continues to maintain control over us. We can assume the following topic, related not to the structure, but to the process of development - at the first level, the unconscious completely determines consciousness, while at the second, when elements of the unconscious are specifically placed in consciousness, it begins to inversely transform what it emerges from. Psychotherapy is a specially organized procedure for placing the unconscious in consciousness in order to change in it what the conscious determines. This is such a funny recursion. To carry out this process, we will need awareness as a mechanism of deconstruction. The concept of mentalization is one of the key concepts of psychotherapeutic practice. Literally it means the ability to separate a symbol from the psychic reality in which it appears. More precisely, to assume that this symbol in another psychic reality will be presented completely differently. Let's take a very specific concept as an example. When we talk about an apple, we first need to agree on the most detailed description of the item in question - its color, smell, variety, and so on. But even after maximally grasping an object within a descriptive framework, this image will exist differently in different consciousnesses. What can we say about concepts that require abstract representation. When one person talks about the phenomena of his mental life, we can decode his symbols through the coordinate system that we have, but this will be fundamentally wrong. Because in this case the symbol will be split into two completely different systems of meaning formation. Thus, within the framework of the concept of mentalization, we can talk about a symbol as a meeting place of two phenomenologies that do not absorb each other, but merely recognize their own boundaries. Therefore, the best thing we can do with another person is to provide him with the conditions for exploring that how his mental reality is formed. What components and layers does his symbol consist of, which he operates in order to interact. We can interpret his symbol by directing our efforts towards understanding how his consciousness works. Why is this necessary and is there any practical benefit to it? It seems to me very romantic that one can consider mental reality as constantly being formed, which has no other basis than attentiveness to what appears in consciousness at each individual moment in time. Therefore, learning about your own design is very different from the idea of ​​changes that need to be made to get results. There is no need to change anything, since the result that we observe appears from what enters our mind, that is, it is realized. Consciousness is in the grip of the unconscious, which determines its conjuncture. The unconscious creates the conditions and characteristics of our mental life and, at first glance, controls it. The unconscious is metaphorically like a dark room in which the light suddenly turns on - we cannot choose its size, the number of objects on the shelves and the intensity of their dustiness, we just suddenly find ourselves inside our consciousness, that is, a cone of light, and learn to live with it. In our mental reality, only what our attention is directed to appears and in a state of awareness we can choose the direction and, accordingly, the content of this image. If in ordinary life the past determines the present, then in a state of awareness the presentrewrites the past, thereby changing its own structure. Awareness relates to existence in the same way as reflection relates to thinking. Awareness is placing the center of attention not on an object, but on oneself as an object. It can be said that truly human existence can only be such at the moment of grasping it by awareness. In the analytical tradition, this idea is confirmed by the conditional division of the self into the living one, the one that shapes what is happening and the reflective one, which is formed during cognitive processing. In the humanistic approach, awareness is preceded by intentionality, that is, the distortion of the perceptual field, as some prior condition for orientation. Descartes called this conjuncture non-reflective functioning; Piatigorsky proposed fighting consciousness, meaning not consciousness itself, but the point where it stops. We can say that awareness is secondary to living, being in this case synonymous with assimilation. But we can also view awareness as a process that shapes reality, rather than simply following it. But how then can reality be formed if it is predetermined by unconscious processes? Consciousness actually operates with ready-made images. You can think that these images, or gestalts, are born in consciousness and are controlled by consciousness on the basis that they first arise in it. However, it is not. If we take a step back, it becomes obvious that these complete images are made up of smaller elements such as bodily discomfort, emotional reactions, snippets of vague thoughts, and so on. In other words, consciousness only puts these puzzles together into one picture and the way it does this is outside of it. That is, both the elements of the final gestalt and the assembly procedure in precisely this way are beyond the jurisdiction of consciousness. Metaphorically, consciousness resembles a child who rejoices at a new toy, without asking himself questions about how much money it was bought with and how harmful the blue dye it contains is. Awareness takes this step back so that we have the opportunity to look behind the scenes of our everyday mental life and see there the elementary units of our experience. It is possible to build a conditional hierarchy of mental life without touching its neurophysiological basis. So, at the very beginning, we will observe a flow of sensory and bodily sensations, which in everyday life are mostly beyond attention. Next, by interpreting sensory patterns, we enter the realm of what is called thinking. This area has many functions and characteristics, but here we will focus on only one unique feature, which we will conventionally call the ability to avoid contradictions. Thinking, working on an economic principle, cannot retain contradictory assumptions, therefore, to facilitate its work, it rather takes action to eliminate the conflicting polarity than seeks another level of abstraction for their dialectical reconciliation. Thus, thinking strives to give uncertainty some stable form, albeit to the detriment of the completeness of representation. Awareness, at the top of this pyramid, constantly reminds us that the form of ideas is actually fluid and does not have within itself any independent center that would determine their meaning once and for all. This idea is beautifully described in the Buddhist tradition. Thus, in Buddhism, the duality of consciousness is simultaneously established and a method for overcoming it is described. Using an everyday example, this can be explained by dividing behavior into two types: the one that strengthens the neurotic (or any other) structure, that is, it multiplies previous experience without making any changes to it, and the one that contributes to the development of greater freedom. At the level of Buddhist metaphysics, thinking is divided into sensual, in which thought arises together with the object, and transcendental, in which thinking is devoid of any sensory basis and exists on its own.by oneself. If we combine these logical lines into one conceptual space, it turns out that awareness produces a kind of deconstruction of habitual forms of thinking, returning thought to the level where it becomes free from other objects of the mind that determine it. The conscious is determined by a certain state of the unconscious, which cannot be its content, this very elusive part of experience. In order to grasp it, it is necessary to move into some other state of consciousness. Buddhism does not operate with the concept of the unconscious, however, it has similar constructions, similar not in structure, but in effect. Thus, in the understanding of Buddhism, a person consists of a set of blocks, or skandas, with consciousness belonging to the fifth and final block. Metaphorically, consciousness is equated with the eater, while the other skandhas are involved in preparing the food. Consciousness takes a forced position, content with what is happening in other blocks and not being able to influence it. Skanda, which is responsible for causality, forms actual experience from the repetition of old things. Thus, on the one hand, consciousness is subordinate to the activity of previous skandas, and on the other, only through it can one overcome limitations, since development can only take place if something previously unconditioned appears in experience. Thus, we can conclude that the state here and now, which is actualized through awareness, is the space in which experience can arise, and not just last as something established once and for all. Just as the brain strives to give a complete image to something that is a detail of a broader perspective and thereby cuts off meanings that do not fall within these boundaries, our behavior also fixes the situation in a habitual response. This is reminiscent of a situation in which the mother comes to the aid of the child too quickly, not giving the child the opportunity to express his creative initiative. New behavior requires an effort that allows you to prolong the uncertainty, because it creates a wonderful and terrible state of weightlessness, when I cannot rely on anything other than what appears now. The paradox of development is that the client can only rely on his previous experience, even if it is traumatic. For him, repeating the experience of trauma turns out to be more reliable than acquiring something new. The moment of transition from the old pattern to the new is the focus of therapeutic work. The amazing thing is that a person uses traumatic and limiting experiences for nothing other than to confirm a sense of self. This phenomenon is discussed in detail in the theory of object relations. According to this model, the current state of the individual is determined by the configuration of the self that was formed in early childhood in the child’s attempt to achieve an autonomous existence of the psyche. If a certain developmental task is not completed at the age at which it was set, it does not disappear anywhere, but tries to be solved in inappropriate conditions. In other words, the traumatic experience is repeated in order to be completed, but it does not have the opportunity to do this on the same grounds on which it arose. On the other hand, the same theory says that the person needs relationships rather than satisfaction. What was satisfied directly in early childhood and served as a guarantor of physical and mental survival, in more mature childhood can be satisfied symbolically and be aimed at restructuring the already formed self. It is the inability to satisfy the need for attachment in a symbolic, rather than infantile, way that leads to the fact that traumatic experiences cannot be processed. A person can either seek confirmation of existing meanings, and then he will inevitably be disappointed that he has no power over the situation, or create new meanings in a changed reality. The therapist's task is much like the task of being a good enough parent during the formation of