The Manifestation of the Psychologist's Professional Identity in the Characteristics of the Communicative and Gendered 'Me'
This article represents an analysis of professional identity of the psychologist in conjunction with with the features of their communicative and gender ‘Me’. The work of the psychologist is seen in different systems: person-person, person-group, person-society. Difficulties associated with the need to build quality person-centred communication, but at the same time maintain the boundaries of professional care, are described. In this case, communication competence can be considered not only as criterion of rendering efficient help to a client, but as a condition for forming professional identity of the psychologist. This paper presents the results of an empirical study of the identity of psychologists using the techniques of T. Kun, T. McPartland ‘Who am I’ (in versions by T.V. Rumyantseva, I. S. Kletsina, N.L. Ivanova). The processing of the results included quantitative and qualitative analysis. The analysis of the data revealed the components of identity that may hinder the formation of a stable professional identity. It has been shown that psychologists are primarily oriented towards constructing identity through personal dispositions; the communicative component of their identity is linked to their professional image. A poorly expressed necessity in communication, or domination of negative characteristics in describing one’s own communication skills is reflected in the psychologist’s lack of professional identity. When a professional identity is formed, the aspects of gender identity become blurred and professional characteristics that are the professionally important qualities of psychologists begin to dominate in personality descriptions. The connection between the formation of the psychologist’s professional identity and the peculiarities of their communicative and gendered ‘Me’ is shown. The individual’s acceptance of professionally important qualities (as a positively formed communicative identity component and gender-neutral characteristics) allows the psychologist to build a sustainable positive professional identity.