Jeong and Han: The Clinical Implications of Postcolonial Theology on Suffering and Oppression

Biographical Information ¹

Born in South Korea in 1966, Wonhee Anne Joh’s early memories center around her paternal grandmother. Joh’s grandmother withstood her family’s wrath and sold land behind her husband’s back to educate all of her daughters, six of nine children in the family. Her grandmother’s courage and resolve left a strong impression on Joh.

During the Japanese occupation of Korea, Joh’s paternal family was involved in the resistance movement. Her father was 9 years old when he witnessed the arrest and public execution of his eldest brother for participating in the underground liberation movement. This brutal oppression, violence, and injustice became an unresolved han ² in her family history. Her family was exiled to a small village in Kwang-Ju with other insurgents, which later became home to many marginalized by the dominant political powers in Korea. Even after her family immigrated to North America, her father always kept emotional and political ties to Korea. One of Joh’s critical childhood memories involves marching with her father in downtown Chicago to protest against the Korean government’s violent suppression of the pro-democracy uprising led by students in Kwang-Ju in 1980. Her father is still active in his efforts within the Korean immigrant community in supporting peaceful reunification of Korea. Joh attributes the roots of her passion for resistance against oppression to her father’s political commitment and family history.

Like the majority of Korean immigrants in the United States that make up the third wave cohort (1965–present; Min, 2006), Joh migrated with her family in the late 1970s; she was 9 years old. The Johs initially joined her mother’s side of the family in Las Vegas before settling down in Chicago. Her recollection of growing up in the mid-East region was that there were not many Koreans or Asians at that time, and it was “very racist.” She recalls painful memories of hearing kids on the street repeatedly taunt, “Go back to where you came from!” Sadly, what she heard from kids in third grade reverberated throughout her life into adulthood, especially after the 9/11 attack in New York. But perhaps even more painfully, her children would grow up to share similar experiences.

As Korean immigrants internalized racism and shame, she saw the strategy many adopted was to work hard to be “successful,” attempting to move away from pain and hardship by quickly assimilating to the majority culture. However, the model minority myth or the myths of inclusivity only offer “a false sense of honorary whiteness” or acceptance into whiteness for some Asian Americans (Joh, 2012, p. 9). Subsequently, she witnessed stratification by class based on wealth and educational level in the Korean American church where professionals were ashamed to associate with folks like her parents who ran a dry cleaner.

Joh’s ties with the Korean American church broke after her divorce. She became isolated from Korean American community because of the stigma. The church was unwelcoming toward her children who did not live with both parents, leading to feelings of disappointment and hurt. Raising two adolescent sons, she also became more aware of racism as they wrestled with their manhood in the context of a “white supremist” racist culture. The injustices experienced by her family and others in the community based on race, gender, class, sexuality, and religion have come to influence her thinking and writing over the years.

Joh graduated from North Central College in Naperville, Illinois, in 1989 with a BA in Religious Studies, English Literature, and Political Science. She then earned an MDiv in Systematic Theology from the Princeton Theological Seminary in Princeton, New Jersey in 1992 and earned her PhD in Theological and Philosophical Studies from Drew University in Madison, New Jersey in 2003. Joh taught as an Assistant Professor of Theology at Phillips Theological Seminary in Tulsa, Oklahoma, from 2005–2009. She served as an Associate Professor of Theology at the Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary in Evanston, Illinois, in 2009 and became the first Korean American woman to be a full professor in the seminary in 2017. As a Professor of Theology and Culture, her research and scholarship focus on postcolonialism, critical ethnic/race and feminist theories, Asian American and Asia Pacific studies, and constructive theology. She also serves as the co-chair of the Theology and Religious Reflection Section of the American Academy of Religion as well as the faculty director of the Center for Asian/Asian American Ministry at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary.

Seminal Theological Themes

For this article, I will focus on Joh’s (2006) earlier work, Heart of the Cross: A Postcolonial Christology, which presents a new understanding of the cross by introducing the Korean concept of jeong ³ —a complex, multidimensional meaning of love and relationality—to interrogate blunt dichotomies of self and other, oppressor and oppressed:

Jeong is a Korean way of conceiving an often complex constellation of relationality of the self with the other that is deeply associated with compassion, love, vulnerability, and acceptance of heterogeneity as essential to life. It not only smooths harsh feelings, such as dislike or even hate, but has a way of making relationships richly complex by moving away from a binary, oppositional perception of reality, such as oppressor and oppressed. (p. xxi)

Grounded in postcolonial theory, which is always situated and historical, she utilizes her autobiographical experience of living between two cultures. Her struggles with a prevailing sense of displacement and exclusion bring a much-needed, unique theological sensitivity embedded in her bicultural identity, which has been largely neglected by dominant discourse. Adapting Du Bois’ (1897, 1903/1999) critical work, she notes the diasporic or hybrid identity is filled with “double consciousness” of having to constantly renegotiate one’s history and diverse immigrant experiences against violent forces of homogenization. Raising awareness that essentialist notions of race, gender, class, and ethnicity fail to account for the complex and dynamic social reality bicultural individuals face, postcolonial scholarship has much to offer American psychology in general and integration of theology and psychology in particular which has traditionally taken a detached stance toward the culture of the “other” and differences with a dominant bias toward universalism, essentialism, and natural science approach (Pak, 2020a).

Theologically, Joh (2006) argues deconstructing the binary perspective is crucial for not only dismantling the divide between self and other, but also reconceptualizing the cross as where Christ empowers many people who are suffering and oppressed. Unlike other feminist scholars who have moved away from the cross as source of disempowerment, Joh moves toward it to address both suffering and empowerment. Despite her family’s han and history of suffering in Korea that were further deepened through traumatic experiences in North America stemming from immigration, class, race, gender, and politics, it was the presence of jeong that powerfully enabled them to live with hope despite brokenness. Thus, based on reflections of her own family as well as Korean people’s collective experience of injustice and suffering, she develops a postcolonial theology of atonement that proposes jeong intertwined with han are fully embodied by Christ on the cross and overcome powers of oppression.

Even before postcolonial theory arose, as Joh (2006) acknowledges, Korean liberation or Minjung theology has addressed the history of Korean people’s individual and collective suffering primarily caused by social, political, and economic factors through the concept of han; Korean feminist theologians have brought additional attention to women’s oppression complicated by patriarchal system. For example, describing han as a heart broken, ruptured, or wounded by violence and injustice, Park (1993) has further connected han not only to the traditional doctrine of sin and sinners, but also to the victims of sin, in which han could manifest actively (aggressive emotion) or inactively (acquiescent spirit). Through psychological application, Lee (1994) continued to expand upon han by differentiating original han (based on object relations theory on early childhood experience and repressed memory) from secondary han (social/structural factors noted by Minjung theologians); moreover, he insightfully identified and articulated the complexity of han with a deeper analysis of the following emotional states: (1) won-han (revengeful feelings), (2) hu-han (emptiness), and (3) jeong-han (mixed emotions of love and hate).

Informed by these prior analyses of han, Joh (2006) elaborates on its “double-edged” nature in regard to the coexistence of the oppressed and oppressor as well as love and hate. She highlights experiences of han tend to become won-han if anger/hate grows and turns into vengeance; on the other hand, han can become jeong-han if love grows and encourages transformation and adaptation. Under the patriarchy, Joh points out that jeong-han typically cast as a way for women to deal with han and is consequently overlooked as passive or ineffective; however, she argues that there is immense potential power in jeong to overcome han. Traditionally, han is often resolved through dan ⁴ , which means to “cut off” or “depart from systems of injustice and oppression” (Joh, 2006, p. 119). Although dan is characterized as a masculine way of dismantling oppression, Joh states that it is the praxis of jeong that transforms relationships and oppressive systems; for example, rather than utilizing dan to cut off, Jesus embodied jeong in his ministry and on the cross to transform the world by embracing not only victims and the oppressed, but also perpetrators and oppressors.

Joh interestingly sees the complexity of han echoed in Julia Kriesteva’s (1982) depiction of melancholy and utilizes her concept of abjection and love to develop the argument that Jesus performs a “double gesture” on the cross, as he fully embraces both han and jeong. Hence, while Joh (2006) does not deny the cross as source of pain and suffering, she contends jeong as the stronger “power embodied in redemptive relationships” (p. xxi) that can thereby overcome the powers of individual and collective oppression. Therefore, just as oppressed and oppressor are not neatly divided, she argues han and jeong are inseparable.

However, Joh sharply distinguishes the feminist conception of jeong from patriarchal view which “feminizes” or “domesticates” it as a type of relationality that is only naturally possessed by women. Unfortunately, this understanding of jeong has traditionally subjugated and disempowered the oppressed, including women. For instance, it has been observed as a common problem in the Korean church that the model of Christ as “the suffering servant” from traditional teachings of Christology has conditioned women to accept toxic selflessness and enduring pain. Although the cross continues to signify empowerment and solidarity with their experience of han and jeong, Joh indicates the cross also signifies disempowerment for many Korean American women who embrace powerlessness and self-denial based on a conventional interpretation. Although many people who are powerless and oppressed have identified with this language of love, Joh challenges the form of oppressive love needs to be deconstructed and carefully sifted in traditional Christology and atonement theories.

A common feminist critique of Jürgen Moltmann’s Christology has been that there are hints of patriarchal power dynamics remaining in his theology of the cross (Brock, 1988; Soelle, 1975). Although Moltmann’s (1993) emphasis of the crucifixion as a manifestation of God’s resistance against oppression is valuable, Joh points out his concept of trinitarianism is still lacking and contains contradictory language. Although Moltmann’s Christology, centered on the inner-Trinitarian relationship, illuminates God’s radical solidarity and love with the Son, Joh argues his atonement theory fails to adequately address theological dimensions of the death of Jesus on the cross because this event also takes place by radical separation. Moltmann (1993) believes the “theological dimensions of the death of Jesus on the cross is what happens between Jesus and Father in the spirit of abandonment and surrender” (p. 207).

Feminist theologians have traditionally challenged such language of “abandonment” and “surrender” which reifies patriarchal power dynamics to legitimatize both an oppressive position of domination as well as victims’ acceptance of oppression by spiritualizing suffering as a “Christian virtue” (e.g., Brock, 1988; Soelle, 1975). Joh similarly indicates Moltmann’s Trinitarianism and traditional expiatory Christology “domesticate[s] the uncontrollable, uncontainable power of the semiotic rupture on the cross” (p. 81) and deprives “the crucifixion of its political power for resistance against suffering and structures of oppression” for the oppressed (p. xxiii). In this way, she agrees with other feminist theologians’ critique of traditional atonement theories but contends some scholars such as Soelle (1975) go too far in arguing the cross should not serve as a religious symbol at all because it has been used to justify blind submission, obedience, and complete domination.

Joh (2006) suggests there might be an alternative way of understanding the cross by pointing out that the cross is not death but “is the cross-ing over into a new form of power” (p. 111). Although there is an undeniable “horror of violence and abjection” on the cross, she insists at the same time that there is also the presence of God’s love which Moltmann may assume but does not address more directly. For Joh, it is important to illuminate and link God’s love to jeong because the cross performs “a double gesture” and embodies both abjection and love, han and jeong. The double-edged nature of the cross is critical because the cross represents the hybrid, interstitial axis where both suffering and love, han and jeong are embodied. Here, the power of jeong’s radical inclusive love is vital to not only recognizing han and abjection, but also unlocking the relationship between the oppressed and the oppressor. Incorporating Kristeva’s (1982) analysis of individual and collective identity formed by the dynamics of oppression and exclusion in which abjection and love are interlaced, Joh emphasizes that jeong and han are “two different sides of the same heart” (p. 111). The power of jeong is necessary to bring wholeness and healing from abjection and han. Thus, Joh claims that the paradox and power of the cross is that it signifies not only the horror of evil and sin but also offers a new vision of wholeness and life.

Implications for Clinicians

Feminist critiques of traditional Christology raise concerns over the patriarchal underpinnings—utilization of cross to sanction power dynamics and oppressive concepts of surrender and submission. This is important to recognize the ways in which Christianity and patriarchal systems are entangled to consciously create space to reconcile with those at the margins. This is particularly relevant for many female clients coming from diverse racial and ethnic minority backgrounds struggling with abusive power dynamics. Apart from the phenomena of han observed in the Korean/Asian population, traditional gender beliefs known as marianismo ⁵ , for example, has been also associated with intimate partner violence among immigrant Latinas (Da Silva et al., 2021).

It is more difficult for those already at the margins to seek professional mental health support. Not only are there access issues with socioeconomic and cultural barriers including stigma, but also clients must muster the courage to overcome the weight of systematic oppression manifesting in the day-to-day. In my practice, I have observed clients working through abusive power relationships (e.g., marriage, family, work, ministry) coming from both Protestant and Catholic faith traditions with varying degrees of religiosity. These clients frequently spiritualize suffering and accept oppression as a natural part of reality as Joh (2006) has indicated. Over the years, I have also noticed that this is not limited to immigrants (e.g., Asian or Latinx) but also apparent among more acculturated second-generation women with higher levels of education and awareness of social injustice. Although some clients may articulate critical racial and/or gender consciousness, their awareness of social/political issues might not have necessarily interacted with the traditional teachings of Christology in the church, schooling, and/or home. In most cases, the cultural and religious values learned from their early upbringing are more often implicit than explicit. However, even in rare instances where clients are aware of inconsistencies, they verbalize feeling frustrated. Clients feel stuck living with the contradiction of believing in God’s power to save and liberate while simultaneously feeling obligated to surrender to suffering and oppression. In these moments, theology holds potential for the integration necessary in therapy for healing and restoration. The new wave of Asian/Asian American feminist theologians such as Joh offer the much-needed language and resource for engaging in critical dialogue on postcolonialism and traditional Christology.

More specifically, I find Joh’s (2006) discussion of Lee’s (1994) expanded psychological component of differentiating original han based on early childhood experience and secondary han caused by social/structural factors particularly helpful in unraveling the complex interaction of internalized oppression in therapy with many racial and ethnic minority women. Processing deeper emotional pain stemming from both inner and outer factors requires intricate work through varying layers of emotional states revolving around won-han, hu-han, and jeong-han. A common pitfall or danger in working through these complex layers of han is either moving too quickly and only scratching the surface or getting stuck in one end of won-han (e.g., resentment and anger acted out destructively) or the other end of hu-han (e.g., emptiness and depression resulting in despair). Needless to say, it requires tremendous patience and discernment on the therapist’s part in navigating clients through layers of internalized systems of multiple oppressions. Most clinicians may be trained in helping individuals through the hu-han’s depressive cycle and grieving process; however, much less culturally nuanced in guiding through won-han and not reinforcing clients’ impulse to practice dan in simply cutting off sources of pain, such as family, church, or work.

Just as feminists and other social activists may be too quick to advocate a patriarchal method of dan and insist on dismantling oppressive systems as the only viable way, in the therapy room clinicians are in similar danger of naively aiding clients to do the same with their personal lives with unintended outcomes. There may be instances where a drastic measure of dan or cut off is needed, particularly when safety issues are involved. However, lasting transformation of relationship and system requires patient and persistent introspection through jeong-han, a mix of love and hate, even though it is often misperceived as feminine, passive, and ineffective. Although emotionally cutting off intense relationships with parents, siblings, and other family members may offer short-term relief from tension and conflict, this does not allow relationships to repair and heal (e.g., Bowen, 1978).

Psychotherapy and emotional work on trauma and healing processes especially with bicultural clients are complex. Although I frequently work with an individual, it often strangely feels like conducting family sessions with my Asian clients. Individual issues are so entangled with their family that both independent and interdependent self-construal as well as the dynamic interaction between both must be attended to throughout the session moment-by-moment. With graduate students I clinically supervise and mentor research, we have been able to chart how effective emotional processing involves addressing all three levels of interactions with equal frequency even in a single session. In most cases, jeong-han is commonly witnessed both toward self and other; in more severe situations with trauma, hu-han and won-han could be present where it is important to work through mixed emotions of love/jeong and hate/han to facilitate processing various experiences clients may have with both self and other with deeper understanding and acceptance.

Korean culture categorizes jeong into three types of essential relational bonds in life: mo-jeong (between parent-child), ae-jeong (between lovers), and woo-jeong (between friends). In this variety of close relationships, Korean people additionally differentiate jeong into two types: mi-eun jeong (love-hate affection formed in spite of relationships full of discontent) and go-eun jeong (love-love affection emerged within mutual and satisfactory relationships). These thick and nuanced descriptions of jeong provide rich texture and complexity to relational dynamics, and jeong-han is not organized in a dualistic manner but intricately interlaced together, which requires delicate navigation in therapy. In one case, a 70-year-old Korean immigrant client was referred to me by her primary physician because she had multiple visits to the emergency room with unstable vital signs. In addition to her physical distress, she was suffering from severe depression and anxiety. Her eldest son’s marital conflicts, domestic violence, and substance abuse resulted in social services and court to intervene with minors involved. The client’s closeness with her son and intermingling of jeong-han made it difficult for her to separate herself from her son and his family’s troubles. After several months to stabilize her condition and working on intergenerational entanglements and the social system, the client continued to struggle with hu-han and sense of helplessness and despair due to her son’s out of control behavior. The situation was unbearable for her with the accumulation of years of han, but she could not cut off the pain or her son because of her jeong for him and his children. The break in the case and shift in her despair started to occur as I was able to seize hold of her go-eun jeong for her grandchildren even as she struggled with her mi-eun jeong with son and his wife. Particularly her go-eun jeong for her granddaughter helped the client to recognize and embrace her own value in spite of feeling mi-eun jeong toward not only her son but also toward herself for blame and shame for the failure.

In many instances where the wounding comes from parents, spouse, or other family members, simply utilizing dan to cut off the oppressor is not possible or ideal. Rooted in relationality, jeong is often referred to as “sticky” in Korean culture (Joh, 2006). Because self and other are symbiotically connected like two different sides of the same coin especially in collectivistic culture, it is impossible to treat one and not the other. Thus, the most delicate and tricky part of treatment is that the client’s harsh rejection of the other/oppressor/perpetrator sustains lingering self-rejection as a victim/oppressed; likewise, s/he cannot forge genuine self-acceptance without also practicing some level of empathy and acceptance of the other/oppressor’s humanity. In this way, jeong and han are intimately intertwined and inseparable in relationship. The restorative process requires not only fostering jeong—love, compassion, and empathy—toward the self/oppressed but also toward the other/oppressor to bring wholeness and healing from han and suffering.

Added to such cultural relational complexity, with Christian clients it is not uncommon to also observe mixed emotions of jeong-han toward God when discussing trauma or oppressive situations. In such instances, theology offers the necessary integration for healing and restoration in therapy. I recall one particular case where an Asian pastor’s wife was surprised to discover in the early stage of therapy that she was not able to pray for herself even though she prayed for others, including her congregation, for many years. Through the course of therapy, she explored how she grew up with traditional Asian cultural values and spirituality which encouraged “ensemble individualism” (i.e., putting the family, community, and others above self) in contrast to self-contained individualism (i.e., putting needs of self before others) as a model of health (Sampson, 1988). The healing process involved not simply choosing one self-construal over the other, but breaking down the binary perspective and reimagining the cross as where Christ empowers her and others who are suffering and oppressed. It took almost a year of working through complex layers of jeong and han to heal from her suffering and oppression; as she was able to fully acknowledge her feelings and needs, she was able to bring herself to God in prayer for a new vision of wholeness and life.

Conclusions

Postcolonial feminist scholars remind us that essentialized notions of race, class, ethnicity, gender, and religion fail to account for the complex cultural and structural factors faced by individuals with diasporic, hybrid identities. Studies of immigrants and their children, for example, show how individual and collective suffering and oppression caused by social, political, and economic factors pre- and post-migration impact multigenerational renegotiation of “security” as well as spirituality (e.g., Kim & Pak, 2013; Pak, 2006). Clients’ various social locations shape their beliefs, expectations, and understandings of culture, gender, and religion; subsequently, integration of psychology and theology must commit to psychotherapeutic undertakings that are dynamic, multidimensional, and historically situated. Unfortunately, in American psychology, there has been a lack of interest in understanding non-Western traditions and other psychologies, annihilating differences and subjectivity (Dueck, 2020; Dueck & Reimer, 2009; Pak, 2020b).

Over the years, I have observed a multigenerational effect of historical and racial trauma in my students, clients, and congregants. Many Korean immigrants and even their second-generation adult children show the lasting impact of Korea’s national emotional experience, han, revealing the depths of human suffering—from grandparents and parents living under colonialism and neo-imperialism in Korea to continually existing under the structural and racial oppression of being “perpetual foreigners” in the United States. A therapist’s ability to attend to all levels of emotional states and jeong-han dynamics does not happen automatically even if they are familiar with the concept and speak the client’s primary language. In spite of courses on diversity and multicultural competency, theories remain relatively abstract, and students have difficulty translating and embodying these ideas on an applied, practical level.

Within the short span of a several decades, we have seen many countries around the world undergo dramatic economic and social change. Building culturally robust, intelligible theories and research capable of responding more effectively to complex problems faced by a rapidly changing world is needed more than ever and calls for training our students to effectively work with diverse communities. This requires critically examining the Western foundations of psychology and theology that continue to disenfranchise diverse clients and communities. Due to historical and systemic injustices, members of marginalized groups are often most impacted by traumatic experiences, which can have complex and long-lasting influences throughout their lives. Differential resources and ineffective services that do not address their unique experiences of trauma need further attention. Increasingly, investigators are called to critically examine existing psychological theories and explore the cultural, religious, and psychological structures and processes in more in-depth, less reductive ways. Greater interdisciplinary collaboration and methodological innovations are necessary to keep the field viable and need to develop new integrative understanding, theory building, and social change.