Reflexivity in life design interventions: Comments on life and career design dialogues

- Narration develops from structuring the past to projecting some future prospects.
- Counselees become more self-determining.
- Operations involved in the interventions allow a passage from emotion to cognition.
- Dialogical counseling stimulates the use of cognitive processes of interpretation.

Papers published in the Symposium on Reflexivity in Life Design Interventions show that narrative innovation develops from a focus on structuring the past to increased engagement in projecting some future prospects. Counselees are energized by the interventions: They become more self-determining. All operations involved in the interventions (basically: telling someone about different life elements identified by the person as important because they are emotionally invested) allows a passage from emotion to cognition (or more precisely: a passage from a felt - emotional - temporal continuity to an expressed temporal continuity), which determines a meaning of life for the concerned person (or a meaning of a fraction of his/her life). The dialogic interactions at work in counseling interventions appear to be the fundamental factor that fostered reflexivity and led to these changes: the situation of dialogical counseling - because of its specific characteristics - stimulates the use of cognitive processes of interpretation, which appear to be the key factor determining the changes.