[Symposium 51] Morita Therapy: Is It Culture-Bound Psychotherapy or Useful Across Cultures?

[SY-51-01] What kind of psychotherapy is Morita Therapy?

*Ayumu Tateno (Department of Psychiatry,The Jikei University School of Medicine(Japan))

Keywords:

Morita Therapy,Anxiety,Acceptance reality as it is

Morita Therapy is a Japanese psychotherapy created by Shoma Morita in 1919 based on Eastern psychology. Shoma Morita defined obsessive-compulsive ideation, general nervousness, and seizure neurosis as neuroticism ,and Morita Therapy was effective. Morita's definition of nervousness encompassed the state, the psychological mechanisms underlying the symptoms, and the neurotic personality. According to the DSM5, the conditions include Panic Disorder, Agoraphobia Social Anxiety Disorder, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, and Illness Anxiety Disorder. Neurotic personality refers to a personality that has both obsessive and self-empowering characteristics, such as meticulousness, perfectionism, and competitive nature, and introversion and fragility, such as introverted, nervous, and passive nature. Morita described the cognitive process as the mental preoccupation mechanism working on the symptoms. The mental preoccupation mechanism can be divided into seisin kogo sayo and ideational contradiction. Seisin kogo sayo is a mechanism in which attention and sensation act in a vicious cycle, causing symptoms to develop. Ideational contradiction refers to an attitude in which the intellect attempts to eliminate feelings that should be present as absent. For patients who are trapped in symptoms based on nervousness, the goal of treatment is not to eliminate anxiety, which should be there, but to let the anxiety be and to use the raw desire behind the anxiety for constructive action. The word that simply expresses this is acceptance reality as it is. The Original Morita Therapy is inpatient treatment, but currently Outpatient Morita Therapy is the mainstream, and guidelines for outpatient Morita Therapy were completed in 2009. At the conference, we plan to discuss how to lead the patients to acceptance reality as it is.