Abstract
The chapter aims to review all the previous chapters and examines them overall. First, it summarizes all the previous chapters—the declining Korean Protestant Church (KPC) (Chap. 1), a historical sketch of the KPC in the past century (Chap. 2), an introduction of a Jungian psychohistorical theory (Chap. 3), Koreans’ traumatic life experiences in the past century (Chap. 4), and a Jungian psychohistorical analysis of the growth of the KPC in the past century (Chap. 5). Second, it suggests four takeaways from the book in the studies of psychology, history, and theology. Third and last, it presents three suggestions for future study—the psychological impacts on Koreans of each tragic event in the past century, the necessity of a psychological healing for Koreans, and the importance of developing a new Korean contextual theology.
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Notes
- 1.
One of the undeniable examples is the issue of Korean comfort women (or sex slaves) for the Japanese army during World War II. Strangely enough, the painful experience, most Koreans tend to avoid directly facing and talking about, was continued after liberation until recently in a different form—the Korean militant governments-led comfort women for the U.S. Armed Forces in S. Korea. Once praised as “real” patriots, who earned dollars by selling their bodies, by their governments that utilized their sacrificial lives for constructing the modern S. Korea, most of them now in old age end their lives silently in despair, fearing the public criticism that labels them social harm. For information about that, read Ji-Yeon Yuh’s Beyond the Shadow of Camptown: Korean Military Brides in America (2004).
- 2.
For more information about collective individuation, read Part IV of The Cultural Complex: Contemporary Jungian Perspectives on Psyche and Society (2004), edited by Thomas Singer and Samuel L. Kimbles.
- 3.
In Traumatic Stress: The Effects of Overwhelming Experience on Mind, Body and Society (1996), Bessel A. van der Kolk and others argue that the quintessence of trauma treatment depends on how the traumatic memories of an individual, which are “dissociated from other life experiences and stored outside of ordinary awareness” (p. x), are reconnected to other memories and create new memories. In The Long Defeat: Cultural Trauma, Memory, and Identity in Japan (2015), Akiko Hashimoto shared her discovery about the Japanese who collectively failed in the treatment. Without a newly created collective memory about what happened to them during World War II, the Japanese still suffer from their cultural complex of being a failure that is being unconsciously inherited from generation to generation. In the chapter “Trauma and Its Challenge to Society” of Traumatic Stress, Kolk and Alexander C. McFarlane emphasize the important role of religion for the psyche thrown into a traumatic situation. Providing “a sense of purpose in the face of terrifying realities by placing suffering in a larger context and by affirming the commonality of suffering across generations, time, and space” (p. 25), religion can be a protecting and healing agency for the traumatized. Nonetheless, when it comes to healing the traumatized, what matters most is how to help them to re-experience what they were unable to experience—first bodily, second emotionally, and third, but not the least, making a connection between body and emotion.
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Lee, K. (2020). Conclusion: The Korean Protestant Church and the Cultural Complex of Inferiority. In: Religious Experience in Trauma. Asian Christianity in the Diaspora. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53583-4_6
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