Psychosemantic Structure of Russian Mentality, based on the Classical Russian Culture

The initial thesis of the report is that counseling turns out to be a special activity, through which a professional transmits certain socio-cultural tradition willingly or unwittingly. The indicated phenomenon is mostly pronounced in indigenous approaches to counseling. The indigenous approach comprises an integrated knowledge, which represents a combination of elements of awareness from the sphere of not only psychology and psychotherapy, but also anthropology, history, philosophy, religion, literature, etc. In the process of researching the differences that are peculiar to Russian clients in comparison to those belonging to Western culture it was found out that Russian mentality has some properties that really influence the process of counseling. This is especially noticeable for those people who belong to the classical Russian culture. The latter presupposes belonging to Byzantine Christianity with its heightened sensitivity to ethics, the absence of the Oedipus complex, as noted still by Freud etc. In order to find out the socio-cultural determinants of the Russian mentality a content analysis of a rather large volume of texts was carried out. These texts of 942236 words were taken from the following sources: 1) the 5-volume of the writings of the holy fathers known as "Philokalia" and 2) from the most famous works of classical Russian philosophers of the 18-20th centuries. The content analysis results had been then clusterized and factorized by the method of principal components . In general these procedures allowed to single out four independent factors that describe 66.5% of the entire dispersion: "logical sequence" (the principal factor), "the value of cognition as activity, power and independence" (the second particular factor) , "the unconditional moral value of love" (the third particular factor) and "duty as the divine essence of man" (the fourth particular factor).