Psychosemantic Analysis of Psychologists’ Representations About the Place of Psychological Counseling

Introduction. Psycholinguistic studies of a man as a linguistic personality open up new opportunities for scientists to develop technologies aimed to explore the role of counseling psychology in the system of psychological assistance in the representations of psychologists. The use of psycholinguistic research methods, in particular, psychosemantics helps to study the origin, structure and functions of the personal system of knowledge and definitions. Aim. The aim of the article is to highlight the research results of word associations of psychologists regarding the role of counseling psychology in the system of psychology practice. Research procedure: the study was conducted using the semantic differential scaling and the method of pairwise comparisons. Representatives of different branches of psychology who work in Ukraine took part in it. Results. It was determined that counseling psychology is a totally independent branch of assistance in the representations of the research subjects. Conclusions: the psycho-semantic research of psychologists’ word associations applyong the semantic differential scaling and the method of pairwise comparisons of all types of psychological therapy according to the criterion of similarity-difference has determined the role of counseling psychology in psychosemantic space. The more the phenomena, stimuli, objects studied are subjectively similar in the generalized psychosemantic space, the closer the indicators of these stimuli are located in the space of signs. Based on such a remote model, subjective data according to the differences of one stimulus from another their mutual arrangement are reconstructed in the space of several signs. The distance between these objects is an indicator of the differences. The research proves that psychological counseling is a totally independent branch of assistance in the representations of the psychologists.