ces they leave on the crime scene. A good example of this is shown in movie "Silence of the Lambs". However, even earlier, during the Second World War, Walter Langer was working in USA on the creation of a psychological profiles of Adolf Hitler and other leaders of the Third Reich in order to better understand their motives and the structure of their behaviour (Langer, 1973), and later on, to possibly control these people by giving personally significant signals, information and specially organised influences. The work on distance psychodiagnostics of personality turned out to be demanded not only by politics (Engalychev, 1999), but also in applied legal psychology for evaluation of psychological profiles and, ideally, psychological portraits of leaders of criminal groups known to law-enforcement bodies, but inaccessible for traditional, contact psychodiagnostics. Despite their semantic similarities, often interchangeable, which are used to describe the studying of remote identity, the concepts of "profile" and "psychological portrait" are not synonymous, nor are they synonymous with "profiling" and "psychodiagnostics". However, the clarification of their logical and semantic relationships is not the purpose of this paper and requires separate discussion. It is possible to say, that historically there have been three methods of psychological assessment of personality, which have a common object of research, but differ in goals and tasks, subject and techniques (Енгалычев, 2001a): 1.
Contact psychodiagnostics, or contact profiling — creating a psychological portrait of a person in direct interaction with him/her (classical psychodiagnostics).
2.
Trace psychodiagnostics, or trace profiling — creating a psychological portrait of a person based on the traces of his/her life activity (home, personal belongings, objects of influence, etc.).
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