Graphic maps are the original method of St. Petersburg psychologists O. Nikitina and V. Peshkovskaya. I regularly use them in my practice and each time I discover more and more new opportunities in them for working with clients. I hasten to share my vision and rationale for their effectiveness. Graphic maps are an excellent tool for exploring a person’s inner world, his attitudes, experiences, needs... When I first heard the name, I imagined something like contour maps of unknown lands. This was not far from the truth. The images themselves, the interweaving of lines, the saturation of color, the composition of the picture do not have any meaning, they simply exist. The map of the area acquires three-dimensional content and is filled with reality when a person looking for a path looks at it. A deck of graphic cards offers us various opportunities for choosing the desired route on the path to awareness and living experience. And most importantly, they create a safe space for this. Virtual approach. John Enright, in his book Gestalt to Enlightenment, called this process of creating a safe space the virtual approach: “The essence of the virtual approach is to move away from the limiting aspects of the everyday practical ego, which is too literal, too realistic and subject to the problem of right and wrong. All these qualities are excellent for certain purposes, but interfere with the breadth and freshness of the view. The signal that you have made this leap into the virtual or possible can be a sudden freshness and novelty of thinking and perception, and also, paradoxically, a feeling of confidence and certainty. In fact, this feeling of confidence is not paradoxical: if it is wrong to make mistakes, and it is in the everyday world, then you need to be careful and checking. If it is possible to make mistakes, if it is “okay”, more precisely, if right and wrong are not assessed, then I can allow myself to safely feel confident” [8, p. 95]Thus, cards allow you to create a space that is safe from evaluation, and in this regard they have a number of advantages over other areas of art therapeutic work that involve the creation of an object (drawing, sculpture, fairy tale...). It can be very difficult to drown out the voice of the inner “evaluator” and start creating. “... why don’t Adults like to draw? Because they don’t want to feel like idiots. With incorrectly sewn hands. Because throughout school and most of childhood, only if the child does not have an innate GREAT TALENT, he is methodically discouraged from picking up a pencil and brushes. And he doesn’t take it... For fear of being judged.” [7]The process of allowing free expression of oneself is of enormous importance and can be a separate request that requires special consideration. And time. Whereas graphic maps have already been created and are now ready to accept other people’s projections and meanings for living and understanding current states. Moreover, the process of choosing “your” card no less contributes to the process of integration: a person listens to himself, his feelings, and fixates on himself “here and now.” Looking for his “figure”. How does it work? In his book “Metaphorical Maps. A Guide for a Psychologist” G. Katz and E. Mukhamatulina describe the system of working with images as follows: “Working with metaphorical cards is like walking through a gallery along many doors that open into a person’s inner world. A card is a door behind which an event, an impression, a human story lives. The doors may be closed and even locked with a large and already rusty padlock, but like a key, the card will help open them. And then the contents of the rooms brought to light take on meaning and are filled with relevant content. By choosing this or that card, examining it and presenting it to us, a person is actually telling about himself, and from this story it becomes clearer to both us and him where he draws his strength, what his value system is, what he is afraid of and what he believes in . We can see how heperceives himself - as a victim or as a hero, as an observing spectator or as a main character, we can imagine what obstacles he encounters on his way and how he overcomes them.” [3, p.12] In addition, we will not deny the special entertainment value of the “Graphic Cards” method, with the successful integration in the process of work of any previously rejected personality elements. When a card that “accidentally” catches your eye “speaks” about such important, painfully familiar things, and even “shows” solutions, it looks so amazing, like magic, a miracle. Working blindly (a card is pulled out at random from a closed deck) only exacerbates this feeling and simply the image is filled with such important meaning for a person that you often don’t want to let go of the card, leave it. An amazing feature of the human psyche is to become attached to an object that contains one’s own projections! And there is so much energy and joy in this “magic”, as if you were opening a box that you were afraid to open (“what if everything falls out!?” or “oh, there’s so much garbage...”, “there’s no such box,” etc.), and there so many treasures! The importance of the safe space of the virtuality of the map cannot be underestimated. The question still remains relevant for me: Should I work with cards face up or face down? I see the main advantage of open work in the ability of the client to choose the card that best suits the current state and at the same time carefully deal with resistance. In such a situation, the client is more in control of the situation. Working with the choice of a card face down, in turn, is advantageous in that to some extent it confronts chaos, which in itself can be an additional source of energy for work and can serve as a catalyst for the process. Svetlana Yashchenko (Rostov- on-Don) in his seminars on working with metaphorical associative maps offers the following solution: use random choice to develop creativity with clients who have extensive experience in psychotherapeutic work, psychologists, and regular participants in self-knowledge groups. As I understand it, this may be due to the fact that the mechanisms of self-regulation are better established, there are more resources for meeting the unknown in oneself, or the mechanisms of resistance are more sophisticated)).Working with polarities. The main difference between metaphorical associative maps and graphic maps is the monochrome nature of the latter. Graphic cards are ideal for working with polarities. “...each individual is himself an infinite combination of polarities. Whatever quality a person discovers in himself, an antipode, or polar quality, is always attached to it. It “dormants” in the background, determining the intensity of real experiences, but can form a figure if it gathers enough strength. If this force is supported, the integration of polarities frozen in a position of mutual rejection becomes possible. The most famous Perlsian combination of polarities is “winner-loser.” Polarities have no limits: my brother's lifestyle and mine; my kindness and my cruelty; my sensitivity and my cynicism; my talkativeness and my dumbness; etc. Each person has their own polarities. To understand them, you need to help each part express its needs and desires in its entirety and at the same time establish contact with the opposite part and for the first time feel its value in a new union of forces. This reduces the likelihood that one part will get stuck in the quagmire of its own powerlessness. Which part will turn out to be the “dog on top” and which part will be the “dog below” is less important than the fact that in this union the strengths and characteristics of each of the parts will be used.” [6] In fact, in all three experimental sessions described below, the work was carried out with the integration of polar parts: Desiring change and Afraid of it; Striving for family closeness and avoiding it; Strong and Vulnerable. Although, perhaps, all psychotherapeutic work includes the process of integration of polarities? Figure - background. A previously undifferentiated need and feeling find their place in the “virtual”space of the graphic card, which is definitely wider than the image itself, because includes not just static drawings, but often a whole story. The image acts as a “frame” of existence, a small fragment of space and time. When meaning comes to the map, the story can unfold endlessly. “An image is a fairly large structure, including, firstly, a figure, secondly, the background itself, thirdly, the relationship between the figure and the background (competition with some other figures). It turns out that the image is something quite large. Time is also present in the image that a person creates. For example, a person drawing herons in a swamp assumes that after that they walk or fly, or do something else. This is part of the image. And therefore, about the relationship between the drawing and the image, we can say that the drawing is a kind of cutting from the image. The drawing is always narrower than the image.” [7]This is why history is especially important. Context. Not only the figure itself, but also the background. Creating a safe space for exploring the context allows us to develop the mobility of “figure-ground” transitions, which is an important element of the fullness of the experience of life and hides huge resources of energy, the surge of which we can observe and feel as “magic” that arose in the process of successful integration.” Changing figure and background is the basis of changes in life. (...) The clarity and fullness of life depend on the size of the background, which is capable of generating a figure. Only in a full figure can freedom and vitality exist together. Unbearable delight transforms into anxiety. When the background has "secret pockets", it cannot be the basis for activating impressions that can cause delight. People for whom figures appear forcedly or do not have background support lose the depth of experience that those for whom the development of figures from a rich background occurs naturally and easily.” [6] FritzPerls in the “Gestalt Approach” indicated that the main goal of psychotherapy is to develop the quality of the individual’s contact with himself and with the environment. [5, p. 29] Graphic cards are an excellent tool for approaching the much-desired “natural self”, in which the boundaries between oneself and the environment are clear, needs are clear and accepted, and the background is endlessly expanding and saturated. K. Lewin’s field theory. At the beginning of the 20th century, under the influence of the exact sciences and Gestalt psychology, K. Lewin’s field theory developed. According to this theory, human behavior is determined by the totality of the conditions of the currently existing field. Malcolm Parlett, in his article “Reflections on Field Theory,” identified five basic principles of field theory [4], which we can effectively use when building our work with Graphic Cards1. Principle of organization. When working with Civil Code, not a single image, symbol or image can have any stationary meaning, the only fixed meaning. Each image takes on a meaning that is relevant directly at the moment, here and now. And even if work with a specific map was carried out earlier, the selected objects can be endowed with completely different meanings, because the overall situation may already have changed and work will be carried out from a “new point”, organized in a new virtual space.2. The principle of simultaneity. When using GC in working with a client, all time as a whole is taken into account (memories of the past; feelings, thoughts, sensations here and now; expectations from the future), but in the context of the “present”, currently relevant field. Those. What is important and significant for the therapeutic process, from the point of view of field theory, is not what a person felt during the conflict, for example, but his attitude and feelings towards the conflict now in the present field.3. The principle of singularity (uniqueness). The field of any person is unique in comparison with all other systems, other fields. In accordance with this principle, we can assert that there are no two identical experiments with HA in the world and cannot exist. The field includes an infinite number of elements, in different ways]