Psychological counseling is the process of helping an individual in search of resolution for his difficulties adjust to the demands of life situations and make adequate decisions. Adjustment should be voluntary and painless for the client. Psychological counseling should not be confused with therapeutic intervention, in which the individual is supposed to return to a normal condition after being under stress due to negative changes in his life situation. Instead of changing the condition of the individual, counseling focuses on the efforts to ensure harmonious matching of the individual’s level of functioning with age-appropriate requirements. In this sense, counseling is a frontier between psychotherapy and pedagogical intervention. The concept of the counseling mechanism is popular in studies of educational, social, and psychological counseling. It includes features of individuals, conditions, and processes that define the role of counseling in bringing about changes in personal development and behavior. The content of mechanisms reflects the structure and functional aspects of a phenomenon under study, the latter being viewed as a system. Psychological counseling is a complex multi-level system reflecting various social, psychological, and personal relations. In broad terms, it includes a subject, object, conditions, and processes of interaction between the counseling agent and the counseling recipient.

Multiple approaches may be employed to conduct psychological counseling. They will be reviewed and analyzed here in regard to their psychological basis and the features of their application. Three of the most significant approaches are the psychodynamic, cognitive-behavioral, and humanistic. Significant attention is focused on the first two approaches since they are the most popular in the perspective of the countries of the former Soviet Union.

As a basis of the psychodynamic approach, the role of the unconscious is emphasized, and it utilizes defense mechanisms. Numerous psychotherapeutic techniques are developed, mainly of a verbal nature, designed to bring the unconscious content of conflicts and desires into consciousness. These techniques are used both in monological and dialogical forms. An essential part of the dialogical techniques is free association, and a key monological technique is interpretation. The clinical terminology of the psychodynamic approach is extensive and systematically elaborated, including concepts of conflict, drive, impulse, symptom, resistance, transference, counter-transference, interpretation, regret, and gloom. All these concepts were created on the basis of clinical observations of various forms of behavior of subjects and are logically organized in the theory of personality.

Psychology, psychological counseling, psychotherapy

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