From the author: Published in the newspaper “Golden Staircase”, No. 137 The relevance of raising the question of human authenticity in the context of the psychotherapeutic process is more than obvious. Authenticity is authenticity or naturalness, and in this sense, the truth of a person. Following Carl Rogers, the founder of the humanistic tradition in psychology and psychotherapy, we consider the authenticity of a person to be the fundamental basis of his individuality and the semantic basis of his self-actualization. In essence, self-actualization is a certain life evolutionary process of “unfolding” the individuality of each person in accordance with the requirements of his authenticity and in the direction of his own authentic forms and characteristics. Abraham Maslow described such people as self-actualizing individuals. What is modern psychotherapy if not a professional activity aimed at reorienting a person’s functioning from fragmentary, fixed and painful forms of life to holistic and thereby natural - authentic forms for him? It is in this reorientation of forms of human activity - from painful to authentic - that the mission of any type of psychotherapy lies! The meaning of psychotherapy is not in the therapy itself, but in the actualization of authentic states instead of fixed and therefore painful states. The proposed paradigm marks an important stage in the development of psychotherapy as a type of professional activity. The essence of this stage is the conscious desire of specialists to build their professional relationships with the client based on the criteria of authenticity as the fundamental value supports for him. This also means increasing demands on the modern psychotherapist, who must organize the therapeutic process taking into account the unconditional priority of the client’s authenticity criteria. The requirements for understanding the “essence of the problem,” as well as the associated professional qualities of empathy, unconditional acceptance, “support,” etc., are clearly not enough for him in the light of this paradigm. It seems to me very timely and relevant to raise the question regarding the phenomenology, functioning and, accordingly, the empirical characteristics of authenticity. To put it simply, how do we know that we are dealing with authentic forms? How do a person’s authentic states differ from his fixed states? The answers to these questions will allow us to lay down a system of real guidelines for the professional therapeutic work of a specialist of any method. Any modality. Studying the states of people who are open to solving a problem, focused on finding new, not yet tested ways of thinking and behavior, one very important feature clearly catches the eye. Namely: a person in a situation of overcoming an impasse does not play any role, does not use ready-made templates, does not rely on beliefs about reality and his own identity. He seems to find himself in a situation of ignorance and a state of ignorance. At the same time, he - like a playing child - does not experience any confusion or doubt, but, on the contrary, is inspired by some intuitively opening up for him the possibility of a new perspective. This state in itself opens up the ability for generative expansion and actualizes generative thinking. We can conditionally call this state “pre-insight”. The “pre-insight” state occurs each time in all those cases when a person spontaneously or purposefully loses fixation and thereby, involuntarily or voluntarily, allows thinking and fantasy to follow certain intentions. If we pay attention to young children playing and engrossed in play, we will find these very creative forms of behavior unconditioned by social norms and requirements for compliance with these norms. Children's ability for unconditional and thereby creative quasi-role behavior, in my opinion, is the directan expression of his authenticity. In a state of creative ignorance, an adult subject, like a child, is free from conventions and a priori self-definitions and beliefs and is driven by the intentions of the unconscious. These intentions of the unconscious are expressed in intuition, guesses, hypotheses and thought experiments regarding the possibilities and prospects of breaking out of the impasse and achieving the desired desired result and value state. In other words, the characteristics and properties of a new quality are revealed to us in a pre-insight version as a manifestation of our authenticity. This conclusion, based on empirical observations of the process of a subject’s exit from dead-end situations, is worth a lot. Firstly, it shows the futility of attempts by many philosophers, psychologists, anthropologists of the past and present to discover the institutional forms of our authenticity. “Deep Self”, “Self”, “entos”, “self”, “soul”, “spirit” and other related categories appeal to functional-dynamic semantic phenomena. Secondly, these phenomena represent systems of criteria that are congruent at every moment of a person’s life with his “evolutionary project.” Empirically, we know the emergence of an “evolutionary project” - that is, authenticity - in congruence signals. In many cases of deviation from this project or conformity with it, we perceive these signals - incongruent signals and congruent signals. A person’s sensitivity to these signals, which should more accurately be called signals of authenticity, forms the basis for the development of his individuality in accordance with the “evolutionary project.” Thirdly, instead of meaningless “deep digging” into the area of ​​archetypes and interpretation as a way of additional mythologization of psychological problems in attempts to find the “grain of truth of suffering”, it is important to reorient modern psychology and psychotherapy towards the actualization and support of authentic forms. Methodologically untenable within the framework of the proposed paradigm are cathartic methods and methods of emotional stress therapy. In this class of psychotherapy modalities, a special place is occupied by various methods of art therapy, creative self-expression therapy (M.E. Burno), Ericksonian hypnotherapy, and generative neurolinguistic programming. Some eastern (qi gong, yoga) and esoteric practices (such as simoron) become attractive for this approach. Methods aimed at generative thinking occupy a special place in the system of psychotherapeutic practices aimed at actualizing authentic forms. Generative thinking precisely most fully meets the requirements - the intentions of the authenticity of our individuality. Generative thinking is a system of mental tasks-experiments that open up for the subject a complete understanding and awareness of the challenge and possibility of test situations. Accepting the challenge of test situations and realizing the necessity and possibilities of such situations, the subject, in the process of generative thinking, “objectifies in experience” the intentions of his authenticity. So, the lessons that we take through coping with the difficulties of test situations are in fact every time intentions realized in experience -requirements of the “evolutionary project”. This is the continuous process of life. C. G. Jung called this the process of individuation, and A. Maslow called it the process of self-actualization. Despite the fundamental difference between these positions, one important similarity is obvious: both the first and second concepts presuppose an “evolutionary project”, according to which both individuation and self-actualization are carried out through the generative expansion of “bottlenecks” in the continuous eventful flow of life. But the question is whose is this a project? – again methodologically untenable. Indeed, as a person approaches the implementation of this project in the experience of his life knowledge, his role as a subject proper, for obvious reasons, becomes minimal and ultimately comes to “nothing.” Perhaps this is what wisdom consists of - to become and».