Personal narratives as intention-existential testimonies
Authors: Furman Anatolii A. 
Published: December 2023

The article highlights the theoretical and methodological principles of a person’s interpretation of his own experience from the standpoint of reflective and evaluative manifestations of his life path. In psychology, a narrative appears as a completed story of a person about a series of interconnected adventures-episodes, in which he himself was a participant or a witness. A person’s life path is a set of events – changes in the forms of physical changes, his health and mental states, a feeling of comfort-discomfort (the appearance of good or evil), situations-givens in various spheres of activity, which are concretized and acquire an emotional color, subjectively evaluated understanding of the world system. Narrative is understood in the context of interpretation of personified impressions, experiences, views and judgments about the causes and consequences of a certain event, fact, committed, committed. In psychology, the narrative is studied from the standpoint of hermeneutics – the art of interpretation, scientific activity (theory and method) of understanding and interpreting (explaining) the stories-narratives of the client. Hermeneutics holds in philosophical and humanitarian searches the understanding horizons of understanding and further interpretation of the intention (overarching plan, design, idea) of the essential purpose of a person, which is outlined by the spiritual and mental principle. The concept of meaning as a unit of consciousness serves to indicate the essential content of the etymological «with-known» – the direct understanding by a person of the principles and regularities of the organization of reality (the world), and to solve the problem of the relationship between the individual (meaning) and the social (meaning and meaning) in the consciousness and life of a person .A personal narrative is a description of the situations, facts, and events experienced by the subject of his life, which are perceived by him as meaningful, subjectively interpreted and influence the formation of experiential structures, which, in turn, determine the time-space of a person’s realization in the world. Recognizing, understanding and further interpretation of the essential contents of the client’s stories-narratives by the psychologist serves to highlight at the level of reflections the real problems of the person’s life and to find perspectives-horizons of their solution, to get rid through desensitization of the usual destructive patterns of actions-deeds as reactions to a negative vision of the circumstances of one’s everyday life. Therefore, in the work of a psychologist, understanding and reflection are fundamental, as they allow empathically to join the inner world of the client, to empathize, to use his bodily sensuality, and in the future to fairly objectively relay the ideas, impressions, values, requests of the person who needs psychological help, which will serve to harmonize its communication between one’s own self and the social space and will be accompanied by intensive development of the thinking and emotional-sensual spheres. The narrative appears as an intentional-existential space of a person’s self-presentation to the world, a manifestation of the experiential scope and strategic line of his life, as well as a form of modeling the inner light as a manifestation of the individual trajectory of learning in significant everyday situations. What is stated in the story-narrative is an integral (essential) property of the person himself, which is most expedient to interpret from the standpoint of a cyclical-action approach as a tool of reflexive methodology.