Almost one year ago, I was a guest speaker and case discussant at the Korean Psychoanalytic Study Group. I had been delighted to get an invitation from Moo Suk Lee, president of the study group, to meet with them during my visit to Seoul in May 1998. After much inter-continental faxing to Tak Yoo Hong about possible topics for my visit, the group chose a paper on the film Schindler's List and asked me to join them for a discussion of a case presentation.
Members of the group picked me up at the Shilla Palace Hotel and brought me safely through the traffic to Seoul National Mental Hospital, where the seventy members of the group gather every other month for papers, case presentations, discussions, and the occasional guest speaker from such faraway places as Bethesda, Md.
During my visit I had the remarkable sensation of simultaneously being 8,308 miles from Maryland (according to my frequent flyer mileage account) and having a reunion at home — a home filled with an atmosphere of creative psychoanalytic thinking and discussion. At our first meeting, I delivered copies of JAPA supplements along with an invitation from JAPA editor Arnold Richards to have a member of the Korean group join a panel of international contributing consultants to JAPA.
I presented the paper “Techniques for Creating a Story from the Chaos of Trauma, A Study of Schindler's List.” The room was packed as we watched three film clips and launched into a discussion of the film and of the process of working with trauma, both individual and societal. Our discussion went over basic issues of how psychoanalysts allow themselves to listen to trauma and to work with individuals' fears about speaking of trauma. The many wars fought on Korean soil and occupations by foreign powers have, like the Holocaust, touched many families and individuals and is often active in defense mechanisms. How to acknowledge and work through first denial and then the affects, such as intense shame, related to trauma was the theme that emerged from the presentation.
The second day's meeting was a clinical case conference presented by Hae-Nam Kim. The conference focused on a countertransference concern involving the therapist's conscious preoccupation with wondering if it was time to consider termination with her patient. Following a thorough presentation of the patient's personal history and of the development of a deepening therapy, the group was invited to make comments on whether more therapy would benefit the patient at this time or if termination would be appropriate. A sophisticated interplay took place in the group as we thought together about the patient's pre-occupation with blackness, Cinderella, and resistance to acknowledgment of her own aggression.
In this discussion, there was a freedom of thought and hypothesis construction among participants such as I have rarely witnessed. Roots of various fantasies rose to the surface through an active exchange of ideas among group participants. Despite occasional language entanglements between English and Korean, it was clear that we were all versed in a familiar thought process, moving together between conscious and unconscious material. The presenter felt the discussion was fruitful for the questions she had posed, and we all received new insights about issues of termination and transference/countertransference concerns that relate to long-term therapies.
This visit to the Korean Study Group was personally gratifying in many ways. I discovered the deep familiarity my Korean colleagues and I share with each other. Our shared psychoanalytic beliefs in the helpfulness of analytic treatment and in the role of the unconscious and early object relations, to mention just two points, make us members of the same culture. Psychoanalytic thinking, treatment, and collegial interchange is very much alive in Seoul. In the world of fast communications, it is likely that we will all be working with colleagues on the Internet — thinking, learning, and studying together. I am eager to plan future visits with my colleagues in Seoul.
Nancy R. Goodman, Ph.D., is a training and supervising analyst with the New York Freudian Society. She is a member of the NYFS Training Committee and program co-chair of the Independent Psychoanalytic Societies. She is in private practice in Bethesda, Md.