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(07/15/2015) ✕

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In this article, we want to share our thoughts as to why we have offered in “Maßnahmenvollzug”, a few years ago, a "fairy tales and legends group" and how the forensic psychiatric patients received it and what conclusions we drew from it.

A brief explanation: “Maßnahmenvollzug” (N.T. implementation of control measures) means that patients who have committed an offense and at the time of the crime had a psychiatric disorder are not admitted to a regular prison, but in the “Maßnahmenvollzug”. There they get a multimodal therapy appropriate for their psychiatric illness and after a lasting stabilization and an examination they can be released again by a judge.
The majority of the patients has a schizophrenic diagnosis and is male. All these types of criminal offenses include at least a one year sentence. And cover a range of dangerous threat, to various distinct violent offenses including up to multiple murders.

Our idea was as follows, based on the book "The Uses of Enchantment" by Bruno Bettelheim we considered whether psychotic patients, in our case persons with conviction for a criminal offense, could be encouraged through fairy tales to reach a psychological maturation. If a focused after-ripening could be achieved. If one understands childhood as psychosis and psychosis as a regression, this consideration would not be quite so farfetched....