ABSTRACT
Cordess and Hyatt-Williams argue that while forensic psychotherapy can trace its origins to psychoanalysis, it is in effect an applied discipline, which has to incorporate not only multidisciplinary views, but also the application of other “management techniques, when acting out threatens to become unacceptably dangerous.”1 Forensic psychotherapy, therefore, is a discipline that has to take into account both the specific characteristics of the patients and the nature of a secure setting before attempting to make meaning available for this group of patients and the therapists working with them. Forensic individual psychotherapy goes beyond the special relationship between patient and psychotherapist. There is a triangle-the patient, the therapist and the institution-and this chapter describes how each depends on the others.
