Religious Experience in Trauma

This book offers a psychohistorical analysis of the rapid growth of the Korean Protestant Church. KwangYu Lee looks at some of the traumatic historical events of Korea in the 20th century, including the fall of the Joseon Dynasty (1392-1910), the Japanese Occupation (1910-1945), the Korean War (1950-1953), and the Korean Military Dictatorship (1961-1987), and explores the psychological impacts of these events on the collective unconsciousness of Koreans. He argues that Koreans’ collective (or cultural) complex of inferiority, which was caused and gradually exacerbated by these traumatic events, along with their psychological relationships with their two colonizers—the Japanese and Americans—prompted them to convert to Korean Protestantism en masse as a means to avoid their psychological pains and to fulfil their futile desire to become like Americans, their overtly idealized psychological-object.

• Psychohistory
• psychoanalysis
• Trauma
• Korean Christianity
• Korean Protestantism
• inferiority complex

“Dr. Kwang Yu Lee deeply engages in intersectionality among Korean history and religion, psychology and theology. His work, out of his desire for healing of Korean people from their past traumas, is the first to apply Jungian psychology to Korean people’s trauma and religious experiences and offers an alternative reason behind the growth of Protestant church in South Korea." (Angella Son, Professor of Psychology and Religion, The Theological School, Drew University, USA)

“The remarkable thing about this book is that it unfolds the tragic side of Korean history as it is magnified in the emergence and decline of the Korean Protestant Church. Using a fresh Jungian approach to psychohistory, the author focuses on the cultural unconscious that stands between the personal and collective unconscious. Trauma emerges as the key cultural complex to explain Korean religious life and the story is brilliantly told. (Robert S. Corrington – Henry Anson Buttz Professor of Philosophical Theology, Emeritus, Drew University, USA)

“This timely volume interweaves several theories of psychology with the historical development and recent decline of 20th century Protestantism in South Korea. Dr. Lee offers a thought-provoking and critical contribution that also charts the interplay between religious experience and trauma and the impact of both on Korean Christians. The book envisions both psychological healing and a new contextual theology for the future of Christianity in Korea." (Christopher J. Anderson, Special Collections Librarian and Curator of the Day Missions Collection, Yale Divinity Library, USA)

• Pastoral Care Program, Blanton Peale Institute, New York, USA

  KwangYu Lee

KwangYu Lee is an ordained minister of the Korean Methodist Church. Currently he works for Korean Community Church of New Jersey and is a guest lecturer for the Pastoral Care and Counseling Program in Korean of Blanton-Peale Institute & Counseling Center.

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