◇Greetings
○President’s Greeting
Brief therapy has moved forward producing various approaches: Solution Focused Approach (SFA), Milan systemic family therapy, narrative therapy, and so on, for about fifty years since the germination of it.
Mental Research Institute (MRI), where those approaches originally started, marks the 50th anniversary this year. However, some theoretical, technical confusion exists in those. For example, some people mention that SFA is superior to MRI approach, or SFA session is supposed to start from a miracle question, and so on. Steve de Shazar clearly stated, in his book “Words Were Originally Magic,” that the concept of “exception,” which SFA developed, was invented as just one method to find interventions of “do different,” which MRI developed. I have had contact with some famous brief therapists since 1984 and often heard from them that even the way focusing on solutions was taught by John H. Weakland at MRI.
National Foundation of Brief Therapy (NFBT) aims to develop the theoretical foundation, the epistemology, the therapeutic techniques, and, more than anything else, train therapists who can apply those fundaments to untangle complicate, interpersonal systems at will.
We welcome people who have an interest our therapeutic, supporting approach for families, schools, organizations, and so on. Our approach is very practical and efficient for contemporary problems, which are becoming diverse and complicated. And we also welcome people who have an ambitious to disseminate future evolution of brief therapy from Japan and aspire to learn together.
Keizo Hasegawa,
President of National Foundation of Brief Therapy
○Board Chairperson’s Greeting
~First~
In recent years, especially last fifty years, organizations of family and society drastically have become altered due to the rapid change in society.
It was in 1956 that Gregory Bateson published his paper about double bind being focused on communication patterns in family systems at a mental hospital specializing in veterans of the Vietnam War. And it was in 1959 that MRI, the institute of family support was established based on Bateson’s findings and theories. That is to say, fifty years ago was just the time of germination of brief therapy.
In the last few years, Paul Watzlawick, who led MRI approach, Steve de Shazer and Insoo Kim Berg, who developed Solution Focused Approach (SFA), and Michael White, who found narrative therapy, passed away in succession. That seems to mean that a turning point came for brief therapy fifty years after its birth.
~Introduction of Brief Therapy to Japan~
In 1980’s, Keizo Hasegawa, professor at Tohoku University and Naohiro Ono, the late professor of Tohoku Fukushi University introduced SFA to Japan. And then, “tanki-ryoho wo manabu kai: the Study Group of Brief Therapy” was established and has provided regular training and conducted research to the present.
After that, brief therapy has been disseminated information nationwide as a new therapy combining with the needs of the age in recent years. Especially, in the areas of education such as school counseling, welfare at child consultation centers or asylums etc., nursing, and legal service, brief therapy has become one of the essential approaches. This is because those areas have many layered-problems of human relationship in family or organization, which brief therapy is good at dealing with.
~ Establishment of NFBT ~
For those social needs, NFBT has established in 2007 as an organization to manage the nationwide branches, “tanki-ryoho wo manabu kai: the Study Groups of Brief Therapy.” NFBT became a hub to train brief therapists and make researches.
Not only experts at counseling and psychotherapy but people who have an interest in education, medical care, nursing, health, welfare, correction, or community activity participate in NFBT’s training courses from around Japan. They passionately learn and have a discussion every day.
~The significance of NFBT~
There are some pieces, which current therapists missed to take over from their trainers, even though the founders of the each approaches based on those (whether or not they emphasized it). Those are the way of seeing based on systemic theory and cybernetic theory, from which originated Bateson, the methodology to see system based on communication theory, and the understanding of the relationship between theories and techniques.
Such theoretical foundation is not possible to be acquired just in a short space of time. However, many practical-minded therapists tend to keep it away because of the rigidity and the hardness to approach. That’s why most trainers of brief therapy have a tendency to push aside the epistemology, on which brief therapy is theoretically based, and disperse how-to information and techniques that are easy to tell.
This situation is not so much in Japan than in the world. I strongly felt the tendency even when I visited MRI to study, which was the home of brief therapy. It’s probably fate and the real dirt for such institutes that have to provide training to different levels of therapists at the same time in the same place.
However, if nothing else, NFBT aims to have the solid theoretical foundation and the understanding of the epistemology, and, more than anything else, to develop human resources that are able to freely untangle threads in complicated, interpersonal system applying the basis.
We welcome people who have an interest our therapeutic, supporting approach for families, schools, organizations, and so on. Our approach is very practical and efficient for contemporary problems, which are becoming diverse and complicated. And we also welcome people who have an ambitious to disseminate future evolution of brief therapy from Japan and aspire to learn together.
Michiko Ikuta,
Board Chairperson of NFBT