Through this paper, I listed each item while reflecting on each of the issues I have experienced until now. There are also issues of individual reviewers and the editorial committee itself. Reviewers must be sufficiently able and eager as they review papers. They must also of course make fair and just review decisions. It should be absolutely unthinkable for a reviewer to make decisions to accept or deny papers without any evidence. However, there may be papers that are written with more freedom than papers that are under review, and the level of ability may be far higher than those papers reviewed. The academic freedom must not be sacrificed. Thus, defining the review scope will be an important issue for the future.

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Peer review is at least partly problematic in that it causes publication bias, making much of the scientific literature dubious. Several proposals are made. Among them, stopping anonymous review will greatly improve the quality of peer review.

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When we attempt at submitting our papers to the scholarly journals which carry the article of clinical psychology, it always happens that some comments of the reviewer seem to be jug-handled referee reading. The irrefutable fact is that the journal which submits articles for peer review can be provided with power structure in a way and , thus, we may need to call it “politics of peer review.” With a background like that, the author makes a proposal in final form that reviewers must be aware of their stances of authoritarian power toward a subordinate poster of prepublication paper.

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This report is a case study of peer reviewing when the author submitted a manuscript to the Japanese Journal of Humanistic Psychology about 10 years ago. The review results were of questionable quality. It did not seem that the criteria of each referee were consistent and in accordance with the J.J.H.P.'s byelaw. One of the referee's comments included even an obvious mistake. The article was on the relationship between C.R.Rogers, who had a huge influence on both education and clinical psychology in postwar Japan, and Christianity. The claims of the article should have been in disagreement with mainstream views of Japanese “Rogerians”. That referee seemed to have failed to understand the content of the article. One of the reasons the author take up this past incident now is that time enabled the author to reexamine the article and the referees' comments objectively and calmly. Discussing this case of poor reviewing should be important for improving the peer review.

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Is the peer review system in academic journals working properly? We considered this question in its details by examining two psychological papers rejected and their review reports in order to find out the elements of the problem and manage to get out of them. One of the two papers constructs a logical and formal discussion to deduce the existence of immaterial soul independent of the brain. The other proposes a renewal of the scheme of psychotherapy and the method of case study, through a therapeutic case report in a relatively special environment of public education. The two studies with contrastive characters have in common a feature of novelty in their research attitudes. Examining the review reports, we found little common advisory instruction and no appropriate reason of rejection unless written with misunderstandings. The paper on psychotherapy received a considerable number of review reports with no reason of the rejection and apparent inability of reviewers in understanding the contents. The latter was often counted as the reason of dismissal. In a case of repeated review, the reviewers were inclined to regard the previous reviews as invincible and to put them as premisses of consideration, paying no attention to rebuttals of the author. In other words, the general tendency of the reviews was authoritarianism with faultfindings on the ground of caprice. These results strongly suggest that the academic review system cannot produce its desirable functions, at least in the sphere of psychology. They also make us suspicious about the quality and appropriateness of professors and research/education personnel in universities and post-graduate schools, so far as psychology and the studies of mind are concerned. The problems should be solved through free acceptance of all academic papers in principle and their public evaluations including reviews of the review reports.

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In natural sciences, almost all the papers not accepted by the referees of academ ic journals can besupposed to be worthless. But in social (or cultural) sciences, the evaluation of the papers issom ew hat more com plicated. Generally, the judgem ents of papers consist of a double process. Thefirst phase is recognition of discipline it attributes. Judgem ent of contents of the research is thesecond. The two phases of the process cause twofold difficulties in acceptance of the papers that arearound boundary areas of different disciplines. Such papers could be simply rejected because oftheir mism atch to the discipline. Otherwise, they are easily m isunderstood by referees notacquainted with the contents. W e must recognize that so m any papers rejected in the current peer review system are rich in contents and worth reading.

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This is an attempt to reveal an aspect of psychotherapeutic activity with regard to the concept of “reality”, through considerations of a clinical case in a “classroom for adjustment training”. The “classroom” is characterized by a rigid frame of educational system and an ambiguous therapeutic structure. Therapists there are often forced to have psychotherapeutic sessions without confirming the “facts” of clients (home environments, medical diagnoses, etc.). Faced these conditions, psychotherapeutic structures depend upon the existence of a therapist as a whole which is necessarily transferred into a session. Psychotherapy is then properly compared to mirroring mirrors in invisible frames. Therapist and client become “Imagined Doubles” one another. Hence, all the cases can be understood as therapists' own including their “Delusions” invoked by clients. “Facts” in ordinary sense can play little role in the sessions. The “mirror reflections” are “Realities” occurring in the borderland between inside and outside of psyche. While the reflected images are real, they reflect the basis of human existence common with the ordinary world to which clients should adapt in the end.

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In TODA Masako's article entitled “<REALITY> IN PSYCHOTHERAPY—As A Case of Therapist ”, the author describes many dispersed conceptual frameworks which are hard to be interpreted consistently in relationship to the level of <REALITY> IN PSYCHOTHERAPY [MAKOTO]. However, I think there is not any methodology by means of which such descriptive style is justified sufficiently in this article. That is, the author does not succeed in justifying her own descriptive strategy. In my view, it would be necessary for the author to investigate more rigorously <Happening-ness> of Happening.

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In Masako Toda's article entitled “<REALITY> IN PSYCHOTHERAPY -As A Case of Therapist”, the therapeutic attitude is agreed. However the ontological position and the composition requirement are not clear about <REALITY>. Moreover the interpretation of the case seems to arbitrary. It is important to show grounds that distinguish <REALITY> from the delusion in the transference and the counter transference. A methodological frame that guarantees the validity of the interpretation is necessary. The clarification about <REALITY> is expected.

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In this article the author sets her sights on an important ontological problem in psychotherapy that has been hitherto almost entirely overlooked — “What is Reality in psychotherapy?” She presents a clinical case and illustrates her points with it. Her discussion is deep and unique. The case presentation is exquisite. However its logical conclusion leads to a kind of nihilism to which the author suggests no way-out. This distracts to some extent from the value of the article.

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In the article the author seems to set her sights on an important ontological problem, “What is reality in psychotherapy?”. She , however, implies a more important problem, “How can we explain a spiritual relationship between a client and a therapist?”. Her article will open the door of new paradigm in psychotherapy.

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