In June 2008 list serve post to the Academy of Cognitive Therapy, Bob Leahy, 2008 President-Elect of ACBT, made this claim:
"Moreover, the claim for a new, unique model of treatment made by ACT does not seem justified. As some of those on this Listserve know, many of the ideas and techniques that Hayes has advanced are directly taken from Morita therapy. And without attribution. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morita_Therapy or
http://www.clcma.com/morita1.htm
Pay attention to the discussion about mindfulness, acceptance, character, values, etc. This was 1928. That's a long time ago. Does this remind you of anything?
Is this a coincidence?"
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This is a response written by Steve Hayes (on 6/29/08):
The claim is false.
Maybe folks in recent years have added things that I am unaware of ... ACT is a vast community .... but I am certain that no concepts or methods in the formative work on ACT came from Morita whatsoever.
I never heard of Morita therapy until well after the ACT model was developed and published. I am not sure when I first heard of it but I do recall that the person knew Japanese and told me that the English translations are not very accurate and they had been made too much like CBT by Westerners. That decreased my interest in reading the secondary sources. The methods I saw in the limited reading I did (e.g., keeping depressed folks in sensory deprivation, etc) it just seemed way too far away from our work to be useful, especially since I recall seeing no controlled data.
We have cited Morita several times as being relevant to the ACT work, however. For example in Hayes, S. C., & Ju, W. (1997). The applied implications of rule-governed behavior. Chapter in W. O'Donohue (Ed.), Learning and behavior therapy (pp. 374-391). New York: Allyn & Bacon, we said: "Conversely, the more traditionally non-empirical approaches, like Gestalt (Perls, 1969) and Morita (Morita, 1929), may be more consistent with the basic behavioral literature on rule-governance."
Rather than a dark vision of scientific theft the more plausible reason for the connection is that many traditions have gathered together things that seem to work, and some of these overlap to a degree with ACT. ACT is a more bottom up, Western science account but it has arrived at places other traditions inhabit to a degree. That is particularly true with just about any Eastern tradition since all you really need to overlap a bit with where ACT ended up is mindfulness (which always includes acceptance somewhere) and some kind of right action (values). Because of the history of development, ACT partitions these broad chunks into technical processes that are linked to a basic account. That quality is part of what distinguishes ACT from these traditions. ACT is a model linked to a basic theory, clear philosophy, and successful applied technology. In other words, what is most new about ACT is that it is part of contextual behavioral science, with all of the progressive features this brings.
