Heroes of the troubled children

The dissertation thesis points to a wide range of possibilities of therapeutic use with fairy-tale material and at the same time offers a concrete example of working with adolescents with educational problems. We worked with ten respondents, 5 boys and 5 girls who were clients of the Center for Educational Care. Based on the assumption that the fairy tale metaphor represents a non-threatening stimulus, the respondents were asked to formulate their own lives into a fairy tale. All participants were willing to work with a fairy-tale metaphor even on subjectively unpleasant topics, and in none of the stories did we encounter any significant resistance. The analysis of stories through Propp's morphology of the fairy tale brought a characteristic story of a child with an educational problem and at the same time proved to be a meaningful therapeutic tool. The analysis of the data through a narratively oriented approach inspired by McAdams and his identity as a life story yielded a demonstration of the identity of an adolescent with educational problems. An important outcome of the work is the evaluation of the internally experienced responsibility of this specific group of adolescents. Keywords: adolescents, risk behavior, fairy tale, life story, therapeutic too