Admission to the Faculty of Psychology

Through thorns to the stars 🌠

The odds were slim... And still — hello, Alma Mater!

I slept and dreamed and saw the meaning of all that wandering in it: I knew the day would come, the hour would come — you’d get your chance and turn decadence into reality.

Now new goals are closing in: Machiavelli’s The Prince is on the table📚

This is what you wanted! For years you tore at the frames with your claws, searching... They told me that to get in here you needed either connections or money,
but I came out of the village and into the laboratory with nothing but an idea...

Why do I keep leaving my comfort zone? Why didn’t I stay where everything was familiar and known? Take my niche, “grow into” the place, put down roots instead of remaining an eternal vagabund.
From village to city, from Lesgaft to SPbU, from FH to FF...

Because for me life is something more than satisfying needs. Because for one who believes, nothing is impossible.

Think it’ll be hard? Of course it will!
But hardship only tempers the spirit — people become human through people...

“I will live against other people’s expectations, not knowing what the next turn will bring,
and once I choose a road, I’ll know I took my own out of a hundred roads.” [1🎶]

Yes, the streetlights here are brighter than the stars. Yes, money replaces air here. Yes, fools pull you by the hands into the stinking swamp of vice...
Yes, here you can barely hear yourself.
The city smog changes you...
Heeey... Enough with the lyricism...
It’s only Zeitgeist...

If you wanted it easy, psychology would’ve been “not your thing”...
So keep bending your own line — at the joints of rot and lyricism, genius or delirium, sect or religion, like all the great ones.
You need to make the goal soak right into the flesh...
Obsessed? Fine. I’m glad to walk to the scaffold like Yeshua! [2🎶]

Don’t forget: knowing yourself alone is already worth it...
To pass through everything human — Human, All Too Human. And this road cannot be crossed without losses...
And I’m drifting on a raft, aboard and delirious, but I’ll find my road...
I go through thorns to the stars,
Through fates and storms,
Toward the elusive Ultima Thule... [3🎶]

And I jumped aboard while it was moving, and even if I disappear here:
A cross on my back,
Escape — taboo,
I don’t know for whom....
But I’ll keep searching until there’s a place for me in the coffin. [4🎶]

Because theory without practice is dead.

“To the question — what is the ‘cell’, the elementary unit, of psychology:

1. Traditional psychology of consciousness answers: sensation, representation, idea;

2. Behavioral psychology says: response or reflex (action).

“Each of these answers expresses a certain general conception. The conception of the psychology of consciousness asserts a purely contemplative, inactive consciousness; the conception of behavioral psychology — unconscious action, mechanistic activity or blind impulsiveness. Our answer differs fundamentally from both of these opposing points of view: psychic experience and so on appears as the subject matter of psychology, but this psychic content is not isolated; it is included as a derivative component in human life and activity” (S. L. Rubinstein, Foundations of General Psychology, p. 165📚)

The first subject of psychology — awareness and experience — you have mastered; you gave birth to the idea in consciousness! Now it is time to master psychology’s second subject — action!

Do not let “desire become wrapped in dreams instead of being embodied in action” (S. L. Rubinstein, p. 595📚).

Now “knowledge of the goal is joined by a set toward its realization, confidence that it is attainable, and an orientation toward mastering the appropriate means.”

“When the struggle of motives is over and the decision has been made, only then does the real struggle begin — the struggle to carry out the decision, to realize the desire, to change reality, to subordinate it to human will, to realize within it human ideas and ideals; and it is in this struggle directed toward changing reality that the essential thing lies” (p. 599📚)

⚕⚕⚕ This is a solemn ode ⚕⚕⚕

At the edge of reality and absurdity, teeth clenched — walking the rim without a parachute.
I’ll never run away from here now, never dodge the merciless everyday grind, and I keep moving along a shaky string through sandstorms. [5🎶]

I’ll keep moving while there’s strength;
And while I’ve got legs, the steps won’t stop,
Until the heart muscle stops,
While these thoughts keep f**king with me, I need to be here;
And while the light still can’t be seen — this isn’t the finish. [5🎶]

And what exactly are you afraid of?

You “learned life from the dead, like the Prince of Denmark from his father’s shade.” [6🎶]

Remember how you were alone, but still took that hard step.
And now the die is cast: either upward to the heights, or a bullet to the temple, or reach the place on the field you dreamed of.... [7🎶]

You’ve got to live and climb higher; for you it must never depend on the price.
The doors are always open for you, and you can walk through — you only have to believe... [7🎶]
Every day is a fight for tomorrow... Let the road be uneven, let sadness come — don’t forget the dreams on your left wrist. [7🎶]

“It stormed at force nine; there was plenty of everything. A stone lay on my heart — it turned into an anchor.
From those smoke-soaked, ammonia stairwells, I dreamed of climbing Jacob’s ladder.” [8🎶]

♻♻♻💫💫💫💫 Personal Construct ♻♻♻💫💫💫💫

This year I can either be reborn or fold up in convulsions.

My fifth education will be the Benchmark. Or — headfirst into ethanol.
It’ll be either iodine or poison.
I work like: maybe a wolf, maybe a yak.
So migraine is a circus; for more than a quarter-century my head’s been cocked sideways, and we’re going deep along dark paths under substances that haven’t even been invented yet.

And why live if there is no idea and no dream? If there is no daily, hourly process of thought aimed at reaching the goal —
yes, that is perseveration.

I’m sick of the image of kitchen-table psychologists. Behind the words — emptiness. It’s fashionable now... yeah, right.

After the Pavlovian sessions, the young science — buried alive — was raised back up by radicals.
But there are people here who, without hiding their faces behind the Persona, will make their contribution to that Temple of Science at the cost of their lives; one day they’ll write about them in Wiki as if carving into granite:
“They arrived as nobodies, went into a dive, left at their peak.”

The saga resumes: psych-fac ahead, forbidden runes on the hands — the secret sign of that same closed Fight Club. [3🎶]

“I have always considered it an extraordinary privilege to belong to the revered and respected order of healers. We psychotherapists are part of a tradition reaching not only to our immediate psychotherapeutic ancestors, beginning with Freud and Jung and all their fellow travelers — Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard — but also to Jesus, Buddha, Plato, Socrates, Galen, Hippocrates, and all the other great religious leaders, philosophers and physicians who, since the beginning of time, have healed people of despair.” 📚

I remembered that threshold and my movement on that day — a short fragment of the road to the faculty.

Living on the edge — that’s a fact,
Being at rest — that’s a tank.
Plant this flag and don’t handicap,
At psych-fac it’ll be like that!
From the basement to the attic,
My own darkness made me 🌓

Editorial note: music-fragment markers [1]–[8] are preserved from the archival text. The available evidence was insufficient to identify every recording and performer reliably, so missing credits were not invented.

Safety note: if thoughts of suicide or self-harm concern you right now, tell someone you trust and contact a doctor or mental-health professional. If you are in immediate danger, contact local emergency services or a crisis line. WHO guidance.