My name is Valeria Lebedeva, I am a novice psychoanalyst. Many people ask me why I chose psychoanalysis as the starting point in my work with people. I think that both as a student who is just about to get acquainted with psychoanalysis, and as a professional who has his own established opinion, asking yourself this question is extremely important and useful. And I would like to share my answer to this question. Firstly, psychoanalysis works with everything that is “wrong” with a person in life. It can be a concrete “something is wrong” or an abstract one. And, of course, psychoanalysis has not been and will never be a panacea that always suits everyone. But it is psychoanalytically oriented therapists who work most effectively at the psychotic level of personality organization. People at this level are devastated, disturbed, disorganized. It is this approach that gives the patient freedom of expression, and, consequently, the choice of the focus of work, since he feels that the psychoanalyst follows him and does not impose his own rules. This is one of the few, if not the only, system that effectively works with individuals who are usually diagnosed with schizophrenia, manic-depressive psychosis, and treated by suppressing the productive function of the psyche with antidepressants and other similar drugs, and as a result, patients turn into a “vegetable”, but do not recover. Psychoanalysis, in addition to relieving the symptom, also treats the syndrome, which is the root cause of the symptom complex. This is also a rare type of help that allows a person to get back on his feet, without offering “crutches” in exchange for independently experiencing a painful experience, it helps a person find resources within himself, heal those wounds that bleed deep inside, in order to cope with the frustrating aspect of life, using only your own psychic energy. Secondly, I respect psychoanalysis because, among other things, it has a widely developing theoretical and experimental base that is constantly testing itself. This means that psychoanalysis is not only a series of well-founded points of view, but also a system of values, an angle of view, and sometimes even a “way of life.” For example, coffee can be considered from the point of view of chemical composition, formulas, physical properties, taste, color of smell, human physiology and biochemistry, etc. Likewise, psychoanalysis is a certain system of views on the structure and functioning of the psyche, certain professional “glasses.” The great psychoanalyst S. Freud, 100 years ago, was busy searching for where exactly the psyche is located in the human body. At that time, he did not have enough tools to complete his research. But he came closer to the truth, finding the substrate of the psyche in the human embryo. Further, this theory developed into the modern direction of neuropsychoanalysis (J. Panksep, M. Solms, etc.), whose representatives were able to discover the place of origin of the psyche, i.e. its neurohumoral substrate (nerve fibers that penetrate the entire body). Thus, the consistency of Freud’s construction of the first and second topics of the mental apparatus was proven (and sometimes he relied only on his own assumptions, which he tried to prove in practice). In my opinion, this is a very good reason to take psychoanalysis seriously and with confidence. Thirdly, in various types of psychotherapy and philosophical and psychological views on the mental and mental life of a person, by and large, we are talking about the same thing, but sometimes it is called differently. Let's go back to the coffee example. As I already said, coffee can be described from different points of view, but coffee will not cease to be coffee, i.e. a drink with certain constant characteristics that distinguish it from others. So here, the lexical meaning of the terms of different areas of psychotherapy, although different, is still synonymous and denotes the same mechanisms of the psyche, as well as the similarity of the goals achieved in working with people. Fourthly, who is familiar with the work of Freud.