※ Reproduced from the Proceedings of The First Joint Academic Meeting in Commemoration of Professor Dongshick Rhee's Kohi (70th birthday), The Korean Academy of Psychotherapists, The American Academy of Psychoanalysis.
This commemoration lecture was given at the above mentioned Meeting, held on August 4, 1990, in Seoul, Korea.
The Integration of East and West Psychotherapy
Rhee, Dongshick. M.D.
Distinguished guests, members of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis and the Korean Academy of Psychotherapists, and ladies and gentlemen! It is my great pleasure and honor to give this lecture to you at this time and place. This is the culmination and crystallization of my 70 years of life and 48 years of psychiatric practice.
I was born as the eldest grandson of my family under the Japanese occupation of Korea, 2 years after the 1919 Korean independence uprising. What has plagued me from my childhood until now is the distorted idea of my fellow countrymen that foreigners or foreign cultures are better than Korean.
I started psychiatry in 1942 when the Second World War was under way. At that time the Japanese occupied every leading position in every area. Psychiatry was no exception. There were no psychiatric facilities except Seoul (then Keijo Imperial) University Hospital. There were 3 private mental hospitals with a little over 200 beds altogether. There was not a single Korean professor in the university. Japanese psychiatry was organic psychiatry of Kraepelinian tradition. I was exposed to German literature with some personal interest in British and American and some French psychiatry.
The prevailing trend was organic. Cause of neurosis was supposed to be hereditary or constitutional degeneration. Eugen Bleuler and Ernst Kretschmer, later Kurt Kolle was the exception. I came to believe in the emotional origin of most mental disorders through the influence of Freud, Janet, Charcot etc. on the basis of personal insights formed in late childhood.
I realized as a child that human happiness depends on the solution of emotional problems. I discerned genuineness and hypocrisy. I was regarded as well-versed in life, like a priest as a child. I made little apology, remorse and no revenge. My choice of career as a medical student was as an educator among the professions of statesman, reporter and educator. |
