The Human Seoul

“Brevity is the soul of wit,” Polonius says. And sometimes particularly useful things come in small packages. Such is the case with an article on the South Korean population’s resistance to psychotherapy (“Stressed and Depressed, Koreans Avoid Therapy,” NYT, 7/6/11). According to the Times, the suicide rate increased twofold from 1999-2009 in South Korea, and is now thrice what it is in US. Yet Koreans refuse to see a shrink. Part of it is cultural—Koreans don’t understand why anyone would have to pay to talk to a stranger when they can talk to someone else for free. This point may resonate particularly with those anywhere who have had insalubrious relationships with their therapists. The other part of the problem relates to the stoic nature of a culture that adheres to Buddhist and Confucian values of “diligence, stoicism and modesty” in which “individual concerns are secondary.” Sounds a little like the Protestant ethic, in which salvation is the product of pragmatism, no? And listen to Doctor Jin-seng Park, a Seoul shrink the Times quotes about the paradigm shift that is the source of the problem: “As the society became more oriented towards materialism, people started to compare themselves. There’s a lot of competition now, even starting in childhood, and the goals of life have moved. We have a saying, ‘If one cousin buys land, the other cousin gets a stomach ache.’” You don’t have to go to Seoul to hear this.

Beyond Therapy

It’s time to reiterate some basic rules about psychotherapy, in the light of Daphne Merkin’s recent cover story, “My Life in Therapy,” in The New York Times Magazine. Anyone seeking to be cured faces immediate excommunication. Anyone who goes into therapy for personal gain, either to improve their earning or sexual power, will be drawn and quartered and then boiled in oil. Life may have an end, but therapy doesn’t have a goal, especially due to the number of neurons and synapses involved with consciousness. Think of it—how can there possibly be a goal to therapy when the exigencies of human existence are so limitless? No sooner do you resolve sex then you are confronted with death, with dispossession, with volcanic hate. History and affects constantly war with each other, producing no Hegelian synthesis, since we are fundamentally organic matter, like flowers and vegetables that are prone to SAD (seasonal affective disorder). So what is the point of therapy, considering that providers turn out to be as fragile as their patients and similarly prone to weaknesses of the flesh? Continuing with our list of regulations: therapy must not end with death. The patient is only a vehicle through which the observations of the surviving therapist live on, like a solution in high school chemistry, which becomes acid or alkaline depending on the ratios that are maintained. In addition, the patient is a relatively unimportant element. For instance, from a Marxist point of view, the bill is the most important aspect of therapy. This document records the exchange of services for money. The recording of a financial transaction may be mocked and demeaned as the lower essence of a grander project, but the bill is to therapy what the Ten Commandments are to the bible. It reminds the patient that his doctor is not his friend, but someone who he has paid to help him think.