In recent years a number of clinical and research reports on the prescription of physical movement, especially sport activities, for promoting the improvement of psychiatric patients have been issued. However, there are very few reports which provide theoretical explanations for its therapeutic effects, that is, how physical movement creates beneficial effects on mental/emotional health from a certain theoretical viewpoint. In this paper many clinical and research reports concerned with the relationships between physical fitness and emotional health and with the applications of movement therapy or sport therapy to mental illness, especially to neurosis, schizophrenia and depression, were reviewed. In regard to the former, it was elucidated that the reviewed reports neither wholly confirms nor totally denies the positive relationship between physical fitness and emotional health, so that no single statement can be made at this point. But, even though the nature and the therapeutic meaning of the prescribed physical movement differs among various types of movement therapy, the reports concerning movement therapy support the view that, such therapy does have some psychotherapeutic values. The authors, regarding movement therapy as an adjunctive method of psychotherapy, tried to explain how movement therapy corresponds with or be related to psychotherapeutic theories by discussing the therapeutic values from the following points of view. 1) The improvement in the relationship established between a therapist and a client: physical movement used in the psychotherapeutic situation contributes to the improvement in the relationship between a therapist and a client by rousing empathic mutual understandings. Given the improvement in the basic therapeutic situation, then these movement therapies will be expected to encourage constructive character modification. 2) Its effectiveness as a means of reaching therapeutic insight: Physical movement gives therapists valuable information and cues for understanding clients' inner worlds, and, for clients, it will act as a means of reaching their unconscious fields. 3) Its effect as an agent of cognitive change: When clients become more physically fit, the specific feedback cues from the body will increase clients' psychological fitness by improving their selfimages. Similarly, because of the psychosomatic cycle of energy interdependence, this cognitive change will act on and change clients' cognitions of their outer world so as to inhibit anxiety provoked by the outer world.