مقاله سال ۲۰۱۶

Life and career design dialogues (LCDD) (Guichard, 2008; Guichard, 2009 ; Collin & Guichard, 2011) aim to help clients identify desirable future prospects, both personal and professional, that may give meaning to their lives, and to specify the means to achieve them (Savickas et al., 2009). The dialogues occur over three or four interviews between a counselor and a client lasting approximately one hour each and taking place over a period of a few weeks. These dialogues refer to a model of self-construction (Guichard, 2004, 2005) that combines various approaches from psychology, sociology, philosophy, semiotics, and psychoanalysis to understand factors and processes of subjective identity construction.

To explore the processes of change that occur during LCDD, we conducted three interviews using this methodology. We sought to answer two main questions: What changes occur during these counseling sessions from the point of view of identity? What are the precise factors that determine these changes during the dialogues? In order to reveal these changes, we used a research design that included a self-confrontation procedure. Because this specific methodology also involves a reflexivity situation, it offers an opportunity to analyze these dialogues optimally in order to observe these changes.

This article consists of four parts. The first part presents the ‘making oneself self’ framework and the associated LCDD methodology. The second part describes three case studies applying LCDD (methods, participants, measures and procedures). The third part analyzes the changes that were common to the three cases. The focus is then on how changes occur during dialogues and their effects on self-construction. The last part discusses how to facilitate reflexivity processes during LCDD by using self-confrontation methods.