President's Welcome
Welcoming Address by Kenji Kitanishi, MD
President of The Japanese Society for Morita Therapy
Director, Morita Therapy Institute, Japan Women’s University
The 7th International Congress of Morita Therapy will be held in Melbourne in March, 2010. The chair of the congress is Dr. Peg LeVine (Monash Asia Institute, Monash University, Melbourne).
The 6th International Congress of Morita Therapy was chaired by Dr. Ishu Ishiyama, (Department of Educational and Counseling Psychology, University of British Columbia) in August, 2007 in Canada. The theme of that congress was the “Future of Morita Therapy: Multidimensional Understanding and Application of Morita Therapy.” Based on his Morita counselling practice in Canada, Dr. Ishiyama explained ways to apply Morita Therapy in different cultural contexts by underscoring its versatility and similarities with Western psychotherapies.
Dr. Peg LeVine proposed the theme, “Beyond Borders/Contexts for Mental Health" for the 7th International Congress. Dr. LeVine considers Morita Therapy to be universally applicable and therefore borderless as a psychotherapy. I cannot agree more. I understand “Beyond Borders” to mean that the essential features of Morita Therapy are universal and its utility is not confined to Japanese specific socio-cultural contexts. Its therapeutic targets are wide ranging. Its efficacy has been shown and extends to anxiety disorders, depression and to major stresses and anguish in our lives. Eastern thought conceptualizes such suffering as arising from the processes of living, ageing, getting ill and dying.
Dr. LeVine has achieved remarkable effects on patients suffering from trauma using Morita Therapy (residential Morita Therapy) in Victoria, Australia. Thus, Morita Therapy in its classic form has already gone beyond the borders of Asia and its efficacy in this new context is promising. In her practice, Dr. LeVine gives serious consideration to therapeutic environments as contributing factors in successful therapy by encompassing the ecological inter-dependence of humans and nature.
In recent years, the construct of acceptance seems to have found strong advocates in Western psychotherapies. It calls for a paradigm shift from traditional western therapeutic emphasis on “controlling” to “acceptance”. This trend seems to be represented in therapies such as “Acceptance and Commitment Therapy,” “Dialectical Behavior Therapy,” and “Mindfulness-based Cognitive Therapy.” On the other hand, in Morita Therapy for the last 90 years “acceptance” as “arugamama” (meaning responding to one’s authentic human nature and reality as it is) has been the central construct of Morita’s therapeutic practice. The way in which human behaviors are understood in Morita Therapy’s “Acceptance Model” is indebted to the Eastern understanding of human nature, which is in turn traceable to original Buddhism, Taoism, and the Zen and Pure Land sects of Buddhism. Thus, the metaphysics underlying Morita Therapy also reflect mind-body monism and the emphasis on the symbiosis of human existence and nature. Therefore, in addition to dialogue with clients, Morita Therapy considers clients’ behaviors in therapeutic contexts and their ordinary daily lives to be especially important. This is because Morita Therapy conceptualises internal changes as necessarily related to behavioral changes. These fundamentals underlie, I believe, the clinical practice of Dr. Peg LeVine.
I strongly hope that the 7th International Congress will find new possibilities of borderless Morita Therapy through dialogues between East and West and will be an important vehicle for informing the world of those new possibilities.
Finally, I would like to express my deepest gratitude to Professor Peg LeVine who kindly agreed to chair the congress, to members of the conference working committees and the Director of Monash Asia Institute, Professor Marika Vicziany, who have been playing a supporting role to the congress.
I would like to conclude my address by welcoming all of you and wishing for the complete success of the 7th International Congress of Morita Therapy.