Religious Experience in Trauma: Koreans Collective Complex of Inferiority and the Korean Protestant Church

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.

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.