The Simjeong Psychology of Koreans: A Phenomenological Understanding of Jeong (情) and Han (恨)

The paper starts from the view that Western psychology, focused on objectively analyzing the behavior of independent individuals, does not fit Koreans, who define themselves through relationships and respond sensitively to others’ inner feelings.

To say “Koreans have much jeong and deep han,” the author notes, one must first be able to explain what kind of psychology jeong and han are.

Not a new data study: a theoretical paper that gathers the author’s earlier surveys on jeong, “we,” han, and related concepts and examines jeong and han phenomenologically.

No separate participants (a summary of the author’s earlier survey findings).
Building on separate analyses of Korean words such as jeong, face, nunchi, excuses, and han, the author looked for links and shared mechanisms among them and derived the concept of “simjeong psychology.”

Koreans lean heavily toward locating the cause of behavior in a person’s heart rather than the environment, so they bear heavier blame for wrongdoing than warranted — which is why excuses developed as a coping mechanism.

Inferring inner feelings always leaves room for error, so heart-focused Koreans see much misunderstanding and misreading — and many explanations and excuses to clear them up.

Han is a mixed state of partial acceptance (“I have no power, so what can I do”) and partial denial (“Is it right to be wronged just because I have no power?”).

Respondents named lack of honesty, showing off, and selfish calculation as traits of people with whom jeong is hard to form — the opposite of family traits, which the author takes as showing that jeong starts from the family.

Jeong cannot be made on purpose; it forms unnoticed over long contact, like clothes getting wet in a drizzle — and trying to create it drives it away.

Kindness looks kinder the more intentional it is, but jeong differs: it is not an intention but a state of heart that arises on its own.

Jeong also differs from Japanese giri (義理), which carries duty and obligation; jeong is a spontaneous feeling that runs opposite to duty and responsibility.

Han arises when one suffers unfair discrimination, when one suffers from lacking what one needs far more than others, and when one makes a great, irreversible mistake.

If the “currency” of American relationships is behavior, the currency of Korean relationships is the heart.

Because Koreans judge others within relationships, an insider’s “psychology from within” fits better than a third-party “psychology from without” — and in it, the other’s objective traits matter little.

The author reads Korea’s demand that Japan apologize over the “comfort women” issue — while declaring no material compensation is wanted — as a psychological demand that the party who caused the han acknowledge it, which he calls distinctly Korean.

Han (한, 恨) An ambivalent cultural emotion in which acceptance and denial coexist, arising from a mix of feeling wronged and blaming oneself.

Jeong and uri (우리, “we”) Jeong is the felt experience of an “us” relationship, while “we” is the frame for recognizing that experience — two sides of one coin.

Fourth-stage han A state in which one views one’s own han as if telling someone else’s story, detached from oneself — calm, lonely, sometimes seemingly transcendent.