My acquaintance with art therapy took place at the beginning of studying psychology, the acquaintance was quick and not productive. Like most Clients who are new to art therapy, I said, “I don’t know how to draw, and I won’t, and in general, your drawing doesn’t help much!” Due to the specifics of my further training, much later I came across not art therapy as a separate method, but art gestalt, which helped me clarify why it was so useful to “have in my arsenal” art therapy techniques. Drawing is a fairly strong means of expression and a fairly strong means of integration. In general, as a rule, in the process of drawing a person integrates. And if a person cannot integrate some of his feelings, experiences, then when you ask him to draw this feeling, experience (what it looks like), then, most likely, this feeling will unite, integrate and appear in some kind of unity with a larger by force. In addition, art gestalt has become one of the methods I often use when working with intense fears, anxieties, and phobic reactions. And here I consciously combine anxiety, fear and phobic reactions into one group. I consider anxiety, fears and phobic reactions not by the intensity of their manifestations, but by the nature of their occurrence. And yet here I will give generally accepted definitions of fear, anxiety and phobic reactions. Anxiety is the experience of anxiety - a state that occurs in situations of uncertain danger and manifests itself in anticipation of an unfavorable development of events. Fear is an emotion that arises in a situation of threat to the biological or social existence of an individual. Phobias are obsessive experiences of fears of specific content. When working with fears, most often I came across the fact that fears, and then phobias, were of neurotic origin. That is, there is some kind of self-reproducing system that does not even require reinforcement in the form of an object of fear. (J. Nardone) A person who has created such a self-constructing system does not experience any particular need for specific situations of fear in order to continue to develop phobic reactions, since he himself, through his mental processes, “builds” such situations, which, nevertheless, are perceived by him as arising from a specific external reality. The condition for exiting a neurotic state is the awareness of personal qualities, which creates a conflict or negative meaning of the Self, and then an internal decision - what to do next? Neurotic behavior has some characteristics. In particular, a neurotic person is not able to independently accomplish something necessary for him personally, it is difficult for him to be present in the present, he avoids decisions or responsibility for his decisions, shifting them to others. Responsibility, which is not characteristic of a neurotic individual, is the ability to respond, focusing on one’s own feelings, reactions and needs. This is why I consider Gestalt art an effective method for working with fears and phobias. How does the work take place? First of all, the task is given to draw your fear and here it doesn’t matter whether the Client knows how to draw or not, whether he wants to draw the object of his fear or whether it’s just lines, blots. The main thing is that the client can continue to work with this drawing. Further, the work is built in the form of a dialogue by roles. (Example from the session) Client (K): This is my fear Therapist (T): What happens to your body when you are near the object of your fear? K: My heartbeat quickens, appears in I have a lump in my throat, I stop feeling my hands T: become your fear, say it on his behalf, tell me what you are doing with your body K: I am your fear, I make you afraid, I desensitize your hands.... This kind of work allows you to “separate” neurotic part and in the future take responsibility for bodily reactions, control “attacks” of fear. And with further work, you will completely get rid of intense fears.