Haruhiko Shimoyama, Ph.D., The University of Tokyo, Japan

1. In the context of development of clinical psychology in Japan

The conference I attended was an annual meeting of ACES　(Association for Counsellor Education and Supervision) and covered a variety of counselling training, of which I paid attention to school counselling because in Japan it has been playing an important role in development of clinical psychology.

Generally speaking, there are three disciplines with regard to the helping profession in psychological terms. These are counselling, psychotherapy, and clinical psychology. Counselling sets a value on being humanistic and tries to develop various voluntary helpers including non-professionals. Psychotherapy dogmatically relies on its own theory to keep its school of practice and aims at training specialists who devote to carrying out their theory-oriented therapy. Clinical psychology is based on scientific psychology and educates professionals who can assess and intervene in mental problems and disorders by using psychological principles and methods.

At the beginning, counselling, psychotherapy and clinical psychology were not separated, but in the U.K. and the U.S. they have gradually become separated into different disciplines. Eventually clinical psychology, which adopted skills of counselling and psychology into its system, has gained a leading position among the disciplines and social cognition as a profession. It is by the authority of science that clinical psychology has been able to overcome the sectionalism of psychotherapy and the amateurishness of counselling and has seized the initiative.

However, in Japan there is still confusion about the distinction between counselling, psychotherapy and clinical psychology in Japan. From the viewpoint of the British and American definition, clinical psychology in Japan is not clinical psychology but just a mix of psychotherapy and counselling. Such confusion is the most distinctive feature of clinical psychology in Japan.

In Japan psychodynamic (especially Jungian) theory has maintained its influence so much so that purely intra-psychic psychotherapy has continued to be the model in the Japanese Association of Clinical Psychology (JACP). However, the intra-psychic model is actually so specialized that it is difficult for most members of JACP to master it. In addition, many problems that clinical psychologists are now expected to deal with are concerned with interpersonal and social relationships in daily life. Eventually, most of the “clinical psychologists” working in clinical fields here have been forced to learn eclectic counselling skills including social consultation.

As a result, strictly speaking, the title of “clinical psychology” in Japan is unclear and misleading. Actually, only a few leaders are psychodynamic or analytical psychotherapists and the larger body of “clinical psychologists” are substantially “counsellors”. Very few are clinical psychologists as described by the definition in the U.K. and the U.S. Such confusion and distortion has rather paralysed Japanese clinical psychology. This has prevented it from taking a great step forward to become professional and to gain social recognition. I think one reason for the confusion has been the leading role of psychotherapy. Since psychotherapy adheres to its own theory it is inevitable that Japanese clinical psychology, led by a group of psychotherapists, could not equally take other theories into consideration and develop a comprehensive curriculum in an academic setting.

In the early 1990′s bullying in school became a serious social problem in addition to truancy that had kept increasing since the 1970’s. The Ministry of Education officially gave “clinical psychologists” a trial as school counsellors to treat bulling and the Ministry of Finance funded the activity in 1995. Finally they decided to start a plan to introduce school counsellors gradually into every junior high school from 2001. It was the first time that the government officially and financially acknowledged clinical psychology as a profession. Therefore, now Japanese clinical psychology has a big opportunity to develop its profile and play a serious role in Japanese society.

However, it is rather difficult to draw up a definite plan for the development of clinical psychology as a profession in Japan since Japanese clinical psychology has not thought of clinical psychology as a whole. It has not even been able to reach a consensus about a model-training program although there seems to be an urgent need to set up an official training program and policies that regulate the field of clinical psychology appropriate to the social demands.

In this context, school counselling and its training are to play an important role not only to provide schools with good counsellors, but also to revise the misunderstanding of Japanese clinical psychology. The individual and intra-psychic psychotherapy model is dominant in Japanese clinical psychology. This is an outdated activity that insists on its authority although actually it is often of no use to social problems today. Its theory is constructed on the assumption that the mind contains a deeply unconscious world that is separated from the outer social world. Historically this was an incentive to popularise clinical psychology, but now days it is an obstacle for clinical psychology to become a profession because it tries to maintain its assumption and cannot modify itself to meet social demands.

In the U.K and the U.S., clinical psychology has made use of evidence-based approach to weaken the influence of individual and intra-psychic psychotherapy model and differentiate it from clinical psychology as a discipline. It has been scientifically shown that there is no evidence that such a kind of therapy is more effective than any other type of intervention. However in Japan the evidence-based approach is not popular and it is impossible to resort to scientific methods to fight the authority of psychotherapy as in the U.K. and the U.S. So I decided to make use of school counselling instead to correct the distortions in organized clinical psychology in Japan.

I think school counselling has a lot of potentialities to innovate this situation and provide new models and strategies as follows.

• To provide an appropriate model for school counselling
• To provide a social intervention model that can go beyond the limitation of the individual and intra-psychic model to meet social needs.
• To provide a strategy to weaken and eliminate the domination of the psychotherapy model
• To provide a new paradigm about the relationship between the individual mind and society, in which clinical psychology should intervene.

I found the new school counselling model of ACES very helpful to develop an innovative model in Japan. Of course it is natural that Japanese clinical psychology cannot apply it immediately to the Japanese situation. A Japanese model should be generated from the experience and practice gained in Japan.

2. In the context of development of school counselling in Japan

To see how helpful the school counselling model developed by ASCA (American School Counselling Association) will be to develop a Japanese model, the content of this model needs to be reviewed first of all.

The U.S. has already a 100-year history of using counsellors in school. However, as the field of education in the U.S has undergone continuous school reform since the late 1980s because of the upheaval created by a rapidly changing society, school counselling has faced criticism that it has been outdated for the past decade. So the committee of the ASCA has developed a national model of counselling programs to connect school counselling with current educational reform movements that emphasize academic achievement. It was formally approved in 2001. The programme defines the leadership role of the counsellor within the school counselling model. This holds that school counsellors switch their emphasis from service centred for some of the students to programme-centred for every student.

The school counsellors are to be asked to partner as leaders in a systemic change by aligning a counselling programme with the school mission which will promote academic, career and personal/social development for every student. Therefore this leadership role means serving not as authorities but as change agents, collaborators and advocates. As school counsellors become proficient in retrieving school data and assessing problems to improve student success, they use data to ensure educational equity for all the students. Through collaboration with other professionals, school counsellors influence systematic change and advocate social helps for students and their counselling programme by using communication and consultation skills. These include skills to utilize technology for broad consultation and political skills. This means that leadership, advocacy, teamwork and collaboration, use of date for assessment, counselling, and technology are the key words of the model.

Before the committee proposed the innovative and comprehensive model, it had discussed the historical problems in school counselling programmes and developed the model to reform them. Through discussion, 6 problems were discovered. They were the lack of basic philosophy, poor integration, insufficient student access, inadequate guidance for some students, lack of counsellor accountability and the failure to utilize other resources. Although the problems have emerged during the 100-year long history of school counselling in the U.S. they are almost the same as in Japanese school counselling which just started in 1995. The histories are certainly different, but it can be said that the task of school counselling is similar to the both countries.

ASCA has tried to reform school counselling by shifting its work from an individual focus to a system focus. Traditional school counsellors in the U.S. have worked with individual student problems alone and they have been involved mostly in school counselling activities. However, the new model requires school counsellors to team up and collaborate with all stakeholders, to involve themselves as leaders in school and community and to make a systemic change.

In Japan, school counselling has been so strongly influenced by the individual psychotherapy model that it has focused on individual student problems. In this point Japanese school counselling has had the same difficulty as the U.S. In both countries, traditional school counselling has confined its activities to a small area. However, today school counsellors in Japan as well as in the U.S. are often needed to intervene in the school system that consists of teachers, students, parents and administrators. To deal with the actual problems happening in education, Japanese school counsellors also need to reform themselves and develop a new model to involve themselves as agents to change situations of school and community causing many problems. Unless a new model is developed, Japanese school counselling will stay peripheral to the mission and function of schools, and might be abandoned.

Considering this parallel situation, it is true that the ASCA project will be helpful to develop a new school counselling model appropriate to meet social demands in Japan, but social contexts also need to be taken into consideration and these are rather different between Japan and the U.S.

First, the need for school reform in Japan is not so urgent as in the U.S. People are loudly talking about problems in school, but teachers and administrators seem to be less aware of the need for reform. Rather they might have agreed to introduce school counsellors into schools so as to subdue criticism from outside. Therefore, it ought to be carefully considered what role the school counsellor should take in the school system in Japan. What the schools expect of the school counsellors and what the school counsellors would or should do is a theme to be discussed at first. As schools expect to rely on school counsellors to help to deal with individual students who are truant and bullied, Japanese school counsellors, at least, have to give a value on the skills to work with individual student problems. So it is more important for Japanese model not to shift from an individual focus to a system focus but to enlarge its work from an individual focus to a system focus and integrate them.