An article is devoted to the analysis of methodological principles to the formation of image of «the other» as a structural component of national identity. Widespread in the scientific community, the idea of national identity, as a construct, purposefully created by various political and social actors, provides ample opportunities to explore mental representations, and generated behavioral strategies. First of all, it allows you to open a significant body of subjective interpretations of nationalist and patriotic issues, identify patterns of perception of certain nationalist images. The article gives a detailed description to a psychosemantic approach, which emerged at the intersection of cognitive psychology, psychology of personality and psycholinguistics. The approach is based on the approval of special semantic structures — constructs, categories, values that underlie the differential perception of the world.