In Kochi the Japanese Society of Adlerian Psychology had an Annual Congress. There came 120 people from literally all over Japan; north from Hokkaido and south from Okinawa. The Society has almost one thousand members. There are many schoolteachers, medical doctors and nurses, but psychologists are not so many. A Journal named “The Adlerian” is published three times a year.
Some of my students gave lectures. Their main topic was narrative-based analysis of psychotherapy. We have already written some papers on the narrative structure of group counseling. Last year, one of us presented a part of the results at the International Congress of Individual Psychology in Lithuania.
This year, a researcher talked about the structure of individual psychotherapy. More than twenty cases of psychotherapy were recorded and analyzed word by word. From a client’s message where he/she had an insight, therapist’s messages were researched in retrograde order, and the first message where the therapist began the operation for giving insight to client was detected. Then therapist’s word modification in the process of therapy was formulated. We are going to present this study in the next International Congress in 2011.
Another researcher presented a new method for Life-Style analysis in group situation. This is indeed a revolutionary idea. From an early memory of a client, private logic is extracted using sheets of papers. I cannot describe the method in detail, because an official report is not written yet. This study also will be presented in the next International Congress.
Jolanta gave an excellent lecture on encouragement. After her lecture, she and some members had a symposium in English. Someday I will write something about the lecture and the symposium.
In these several years, the Congress succeeded to acquire academic quality. Once, so-called “experience-based reports” occupied a larger part of presentations. In those days, on one hand it was necessary to prove usefulness of Individual Psychology in various situations, and on the other hand it was impossible to fill all the presentations with academic reports. I am very glad that we can have a high standard scientific research about Individual Psychology in Japan.