Sergey Ernestovich Polyakov (born 1956) is a psychiatrist and psychologist with more than forty years of clinical and research experience. After graduating with honors from the Pirogov Russian National Research Medical University in 1979, he combined clinical practice with scientific research. In 1986, he defended his Candidate of Sciences (PhD-equivalent) dissertation in psychiatry and subsequently served as senior and later principal research fellow at the Moscow Research Institute of Psychiatry. In 1991, he founded and directed one of the first in Russia private multidisciplinary medical clinic in Moscow.
Since the early 2000s, Polyakov has focused on developing a comprehensive original theory of phenomenological psychology. This theory represents a coherent scientific system that explains the nature of mental phenomena. One of its key components is the concept of Objective Mental Reality—an intersubjective layer of the psyche shaped by society, which defines the human worldview, thinking, and patterns of behavior.
At the heart of his approach lies the conviction that the psyche does not merely reflect the world but actively constitutes it in the form of stable entities and constructions. This perspective has made it possible to integrate disparate experimental data, empirical findings, and observations into a unified system, with a particular emphasis on verbal and mixed representations that ensure shared understanding and collective knowledge.
He is the author of several monographs, including Myths and Reality of Modern Psychology (2004), Phenomenology of Mental Representations (2011), Concepts and Other Constructions of Consciousness (2017), The “Dark Matter” of the Social Sciences (2024), Phenomenology of Sensory Representations (2024), and Phenomenology of Symbolic Representations (2025). Together, these works establish the foundations of a new phenomenological psychology and highlight its significance for the social sciences and the humanities.