BRUSHLINSKYIK THE QUESTION ABOUT EMOTIONAL-SOMATIC COMPETENCEVoronkina S.I., Shramchenko E.V.Kuban State University, KrasnodarIn modern society, in which the cult of rational attitude towards life, embodied in the image of a certain standard of a person as an unbending and seemingly emotionless superman (S.G. Spasibenko, 2002), the question of the emotional and somatic sphere of personality is relevant, since people are not attentive enough to the area of ​​their emotions, feelings, bodily manifestations, which acts as a powerful barrier to gaining integrity and contact with reality. Awareness of emotional experiences, their discrimination, differentiation from sensations, the ability to adequately designate and express them are skills that form the basis of emotional self-regulation, in which a person, by his own choice, restrains his affective response or displays it in accordance with the situation, and is also able to correctly understand the emotions and feelings of other people, which in turn optimizes interaction with others, making communication overall more effective and productive. In a world of over-analysis and rational thought many have difficulty recognizing and expressing their feelings, which is one of the reasons for alienation from their own body and feelings, the formation of “schizoidness” (R. May, 1997). A number of modern foreign and domestic authors consider a person’s awareness in the emotional-sensory sphere in the context of either emotional culture, or emotional literacy, or emotional intelligence and emotional thinking. Having its own specifics, each of the contexts, at the same time, emphasizes the importance of the affective sphere in a person’s life.E.V. Libina (1996) speaks of emotional competence as the ability of an individual to carry out optimal coordination between emotions and goal-directed behavior, based on an adequate integral assessment by a person of his interaction with the environment. Adequacy means taking into account external (stimulus and environment) and internal (state of the body and past experience) factors affecting the individual in a given situation. However, we believe that it is most correct to talk about emotional-somatic competence (ESC). To be emotionally and somatically competent means “to have access to one’s own emotional and sensory sphere, to the area of ​​bodily manifestations and sensations, to be in contact with them and to be able to manage them... to be attentive to these areas in other people (S.I. Voronkina, 2002). A high level of ESC also presupposes access to one’s needs, true desires, not always obvious motives, the ability to determine the differences between feelings and bodily sensations, and at any moment to be able to adequately identify one’s emotional state, that is, the possession of qualities opposite to those of an alexithymic personality. Also, a person endowed with a high level of ESC is able, by his own choice, to contain or timely actualize his feelings, adequately to the situation, while choosing the form of their expression, and also, if necessary, motivate himself and the people around him. Finally, it is necessary to emphasize such important characteristics of the ESC as the timeliness of contact with feelings, emotions, sensations, bodily impulses and the appropriateness of their manifestation. As if illustrating the phenomenon of the ESC, D. Lawrence wrote: “The life of the body is the life of sensations and emotions. The body feels true hunger, true thirst, true joy in the sun or in the snow, true pleasure from the smell of roses or the sight of a lilac bush; true anger, true sadness, true tenderness, true warmth, true passion, true hatred, true grief. All emotions belong to the body, the mind only recognizes them” (D. Boadella, 1987). Indeed, the connection between emotions and somatic aspects has long been recognized as obvious; it was pointed out by Aristotle (emotional processes are realized together.