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The present study is aimed at introducing effective psychological instruments the authors have been using in a therapeutic interaction with people (children, adolescents, and youth) with different problems for a long time in the educational process. The main focus of the study is the metaphors and motivation of fear and anxiety the use of which in the process of providing psychological assistance to students can improve the quality of the educational process and educational influences on them since these tools allow students and teachers to safely (due to the metaphorical distance) address sensitive topics that often present the source of anxiety and fear in students while neglecting these topics often hinders the creation of a safe learning environment. Metaphors are actively used in a variety of psychotherapeutic approaches although very little attention is paid to their implementation in the educational environment. The goal of the present study is to disclose the opportunities of using metaphors of experiencing fear in working with university students. The proposed hypothesis states that the implementation of metaphors of experiencing fear in work with university students will contribute to the improvement of their self-assessment of subjective well-being. The study presents the analysis of the results of focus group studies conducted during experiments with the students of the “Drama Therapy” specialty at the Palacký University of Olomouc in the Czech Republic. With the use of the grounded theory method, it is demonstrated that work with metaphors of experiencing fear leads to becoming aware of self-support mechanisms, processing suppressed emotions, relaxation, inner liberation, and the activation of personal resources. These results open up prospects for the active use of metaphorization of various (including negative) experiences in providing psychological assistance to students.

The following text is an overview study which defines the basic phenomena and effective factors of Gestalt drama and outlines some of the researches carried out in this area by the author during recent years. Gestalt drama is the name of a specific psychotherapeutic approach applied by the author in his practice, which combines Gestalt therapy with expressive approaches (especially with dramatherapy, theatrotherapy and fairytale-therapy). Linking Gestalt therapy and expressive techniques results in a specific psychotherapeutic approach whose versatility and holistic conception makes it suitable not only for psychotherapy but also for self-development of people with special needs, as it has the potential to meet the higher psychological needs even when the lower needs are not sufficiently saturated. The article further presents the interpretation of the partial results of research focusing on the analysis of integration performance where gestaltdrama techniques have been applied. These performances resulted from one-day dramatherapy workshops with clients suffering from mental retardation and with clients with behavioural disorders. This includes the analysis of differences between dramatical expression within the above target groups.

The main topic of this article is host care for children for whom institutional care has been ordered, something which is still largely unknown for most non-professionals and also some professionals, even though host care is constantly expanding. We consider the possible negatives of this type of childcare provided by an institution and point out the disunity in its implementation, which is caused by the non-existence of laws to govern this institution. On the basis of a qualitative research study, we compared opinions on host care from the point of view of carers, social workers, and heads of children’s homes and found out whether their opinions are influenced by their positions. The results of the research also present the opinions of host families. We also look at host care in the context of meeting basic psychological needs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]