A Jungian Psychohistorical Theory: An Interpretive Tool for History

Abstract

The chapter aims to explain a Jungian psychohistorical theory as an interpretive tool to analyze psychological reasons for the rapid growth of the Korean Protestant Church (KPC). For doing this, first, it offers an outline of psychohistory—its origin, evolution, and pros and cons. Second, it explains basic concepts of Jung’s analytical psychology—the collective unconscious, psychopathology, dreams and archetypes, and complex theory. Last, it introduces Jungian psychohistory based on two new concepts of Jungian psychology—the cultural unconscious, which is assumed to exist between the personal unconscious and the collective unconscious, and cultural complex, which is a collective/ethnic complex that, like a (personal) complex, negatively influences the collective unconscious of a people or nation, along with two examples of psychohistorical analysis by Frantz Fanon on blacks and Jaqueline Gerson on Mexicans.