From the author: Hello everyone who is interested in Art Therapy. My name is Elena Aleksandrovna Wagenleitner. I am a psychologist-consultant who uses psychoanalytic psychotherapy in my work. I recently moved to a new job, and I have to actively use this particular method. With this article (it was written for a competition), I want to start blogging about the practical application of this particular technique in work. Blog address: Declaration of love for Art Therapy. With gratitude to my teachers: Alisa Vasilievna Bezrukikh, Olga Mikhailovna Pilyavina, Anna Mergenbaevna Kudiyarova. Hello, everyone who is interested in Art Therapy, everyone who will read my essay. I would like to tell you about my love for this wonderful method and techniques of working with children, adolescents, and adults; to share with you the feelings that accompanied (and are accompanying) me over many years of using it in my work as a practical psychologist. Art therapy... It arose in my life when I was learning the intricacies of psychological counseling. Then very little was written about it... The first signs, a Reader on art therapy edited by Alexander Kopytin and his Workshop on art therapy, seemed very “smart”, but even more aroused interest, which with the advent of a computer in my life - resulted in the opportunity to conquer the Internet in search of authors presented in these books. Further - more... I began to experiment with art therapy while working as a Russian language tutor. My students not only learned Russian, but also drew. And I asked them: “What is happening in the drawing? How is the character (or object) living? What would he/she want? What does he/she feel? Etc. My first shock was the drawings of the 5th grader who was drawing” sketchy, terrible earless men", with cuts, wounds and scars on the face and head, with something running from the nose. The boy was about to stay for the 2nd year because of the Russian language. He looked sloppy, that in a rich in Russian it would sound like “scraggly” and “unkempt.” And in the drawings, this was manifested in an unusual way in careless drawing with a pen that did not respect the boundaries or in the image of a cactus, which, as we know, “does not need care.” In conversations with him, it became clear. that he was “pulled out with forceps”, and at birth “he did not scream”, that from time to time he was hit in the face with a stick or “ice on the nose”. And regarding his “ears”, the following story happened. The elder brother, while visiting his grandfather, ran to the river, and although it was not far, the relatives got scared and began to look for the boys, and when they found them, the grandfather tore their ears as punishment. Therefore, the “boy” decided to stop using “them” altogether, the shock was so strong. I immediately remembered the words of his mother when I found out the reason for his academic failure. “You tell him, but he doesn’t seem to hear... And he does the opposite.” By the end of the tutoring course, the boy began to earn a solid “3” in Russian and “5” in biology (I was able to explain this to myself only over time, having already gained enough psychological knowledge). And in his drawings a teenager “with ears” appeared, dressed in a jumper similar to the one he himself began to wear. And his mother was constantly surprised that her son began to dress like that... I was surprised at how RICH the WORLD OF DRAWING turns out to be. And that whatever we draw, we will draw in relation to ourselves, our sensations, feelings. experiences. I later showed these drawings (in their dynamics) as an example for a long time, already teaching Art Therapy to psychology students. My knowledge about the methods and techniques of art therapy accumulated thanks to experience, or rather my experiments, and theoretical knowledge, and there was a lot of it: knowledge on art therapy (there was more and more of it on the Internet), Jung’s analytical psychology,symboldrama, psychoanalytic psychotherapy, M. Luscher’s technique, etc. By relating theory and practice, I “shocked” my students. One of them was surprised when I asked what hand injury he had and when. He couldn’t even remember which hand was injured, and for a long time he was in a stupor wondering how I could find out? And I just noticed the drawing that he quickly sketched when he was in my office. There was a king whose one hand was different from the other, “straying” from the general image of the figure, as if it had shriveled up. Then I found confirmation of my question, how will the person in the drawing depict himself? Just as if he is standing opposite you and you are looking at him. Later, when I started working at a technical school, in rhetoric classes and various electives in psychology, my students drew, drew, drew... I had groups of designers, from whose work I myself studied, studied, studied... I correlated colors, pencils, ink...arrangement in the drawing with character traits, personal problems, behavior of their students. Their use and choice of color in the drawings was a separate SONG, in which I still find more and more new “shades”. Of the striking examples of that time, the following stories were remembered: A student who drew a house with a simple pencil at the very top of a vertically located sheet did not have a house at all, and before that he was surprised by my question whether he had problems with housing or a house. And the girl who painted black grave mounds and red hearts, two years later attempted demonstrative suicide against the backdrop of unrequited love. Unfortunately, earlier the girl’s mother did not take seriously the offer to see a psychologist (at that time I did not take the students I taught into therapy). Fortunately, everything worked out fine. A new stage in my art therapeutic work was the program “Plasticine as a form of image,” which my teacher suggested writing, and according to which I later worked with psychology students. The Internet continued to be filled with theory and practice on art therapy, but I still found few answers to my questions there... and there were none at all regarding plasticine. Therefore, it was again experiments, experiments, experiments... Practice, practice and once again practice together with theory: Dictionaries of symbols, symbol drama, Jungian sand psychotherapy. The most memorable: Betensky M. “What do you see? New methods of art therapy.” Oster, J., Gould P. “Drawing in Psychotherapy.” Aucklander “Windows into the World of a Child” But the most important book for me was Fers M. Greg’s book “The Secret World of Drawing,” after which the ART THERAPY puzzles came together into one complete picture. Currently practicing psychoanalytic therapy, I remember with nostalgia the times when I was immersed in this powerful method of work. And then I return again to this wonderful world, the world of ART THERAPY. At psychological trainings, I show that the shortest path to the unconscious is the world of dreams and the world of drawing. That a simple white sheet is a living space in which a person occupies a place that is characteristic of his psychological state and attitude, that the choice of color corresponds to a certain mood, mental state. That what a person uses to draw: felt-tip pens, pencils, paints, a pen, will tell about his character traits and interests faster than he can do it himself. That even a “geometric figure” that is chosen when drawing can “tell a lot.” That a drawing has a past, present and future, that depending on the location you can “fly in the clouds” or be “too down to earth”, that a drawing has “dynamics and statics”, there is a pain point and an injury, and much more. That when discussing drawings, awareness of problems occurs and insight occurs. That a lot of energy is contained in simple images... and much, much more from the richest.