This session brings together five interdisciplinary papers that explore the complex entanglements of psychology, religion, and culture through psychoanalytic, theological, and critical frameworks. Across diverse contexts, including biblical texts, Muslim psychotherapy, Korean and Korean American Protestantism, South Korean suicidality, and clinical psychoanalytic narratives, the papers examine how subjects are formed, fractured, and potentially restored within religious and therapeutic worlds. Engaging psychoanalytic traditions such as Freud, Lacan, and object relations theory, the papers show how loss, trauma, and discontent generate not only psychic distress but also possibilities for hope and meaning-making. At the same time, they critically analyze contemporary practices of care, demonstrating how efforts to integrate religious and psychological frameworks can both sustain and constrain subjectivity while reproducing deeper tensions. Together, these papers highlight how care is shaped by competing frameworks and invite reflection on its possibilities and limits in a culturally plural world.
History is replete with utopian experiments aimed at societal betterment. Individuals also orchestrate their inner utopias with meditation, mindfulness, and other such wellness practices. The biblical command to “rejoice in the Lord” (Phil 3:1) seems to stand in opposition to discontentment and despair. This essay explores the counterintuitive truth that hope and discontentment form a pair. Specifically, I use insights from Freudian psychoanalytic writings on mourning and melancholy regarding the loss of a beloved object. How can the experience of loss be an impetus, not a deterrent, for hope? How can melancholy spawn utopian desires? The key is the ability to engage in what psychoanalytic philosopher Julia Kristeva terms “signifying.” I illustrate attempts at utopian signifying with two examples from the Bible: the story of Ruth and Naomi and the episode between Tamar and Judah in Genesis 38.
In recent years, Muslim clinicians and scholars have developed therapeutic frameworks that integrate Islamic theology with modern psychology. One influential example is Traditional Islamically Integrated Psychotherapy (TIIP), a modality that seeks to synthesize Islamic epistemology with contemporary clinical practice. While proponents frame TIIP as a reconciliation between sacred and secular knowledge, this paper argues that the project rests on a critical epistemological disavowal: the refusal to reckon with the genealogical relationship between modern psychotherapy and Freudian psychoanalysis. By neglecting this genealogy, TIIP unintentionally reproduces the tensions between modernity, religion, and subjectivity that it aims to resolve. Drawing on intellectual history, psychoanalytic theory, and clinical case studies, I show how the therapeutic encounter becomes a site where competing epistemological paradigms— Freudian psychology, Islamic metaphysics, and modern clinical science— collide. Borrowing from Lacan’s concept of the “split subject,” I argue that TIIP stages the fracture of modern Muslim subjectivity, managing religious shame without resolving the deeper epistemic tensions produced by colonial modernity.
Purity culture is often described as conservative sexual morality. This paper argues that, in Korean, Korean American, and U.S. evangelical Protestant contexts, it also functions as an authoritarian religious formation. Focusing on the U.S.–Korea Protestant corridor, it examines how sermons, curricula, and public religious rhetoric cast obedience, patriarchy, and sexual discipline as forms of safety, belonging, and moral clarity under conditions of threat. I call this dynamic certainty-as-care. Drawing on political psychology, psychodynamic approaches to religion, attachment theory, and scholarship on institutional betrayal, the paper shows why disclosures of abuse are often received as threats to sacred order rather than as calls to protect the harmed. When authority has already been coded as protective, communities may defend leaders, blame survivors, and suppress dissent. Sexual impunity, then, is one of purity culture’s structural risks.
This paper explores the intersection of biblical exegesis and psychoanalytic theory, placing the narrative of Jonah as interpreted by Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, in dialogue with the clinical autobiography of psychoanalyst Harry Guntrip. Central to this study is the concept of third spaces—psychological clearings that emerge both within and beyond the primary dyadic relationship. By examining Jonah’s reaction to the short-lived gourd and Guntrip’s reaction to the death of D.W. Winnicott, I argue that both figures suffer from an "interruption in holistic memory” caused by early childhood trauma, which results in foreclosed perceptions of the future. Trauma-related affects reside in these bodies, initially unbearable, leading to schizoid withdrawals from self and others. The paper concludes that the emergence of therapeutic third spaces allows for the integration of previously undetectable affect to begin, moving the subject from states of withdrawal toward capacities for uncertainty, emotional intimacy, and possibility.
South Korea consistently maintains the highest suicide rate among OECD nations. Utilizing Carrie Doehring’s trifocal lenses and theological reflexivity, this research reconstructs Korean suicidality through an intercultural practical theological framework. While Western suicidology identifies anxious attachment as the primary predictor of suicide, recent quantitative data reveal that avoidant attachment (r =.648) constitutes a more pervasive "silent danger" in the Korean context. By transitioning from the modern lens of empirical data to a postmodern analysis of systemic isolation and individual alterity, this study structures a methodology grounded in the indigenous theology of Salim. Following a tripartite method of suspicion, retrieval, and reconstruction, the research integrates Doehring’s concepts of lament and communal accountability to address the "silent screams" of the avoidant care seeker. Ultimately, this study proposes a life-giving theology that transforms suicidality statistics into a restorative practice of communal Salim.