ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Naming the Western ‘Psy’ Sciences in East Asia: Between 精神 (chŏngsin) and 心理 (simni), the Case of Psychoanalysis (精神分析) in South Korea

• In Event: Psychological Sciences in East and Southeast Asia, 19th to Mid-20th Centuries

English Abstract

Recent scholarship in the history of science has focused on how knowledge circulates across geographical, cultural, and national boundaries. The globalisation of goods, people, and ideas intensified interest in how knowledge travels, is translated, and transformed, while broader access to multilingual sources underscored how local and global dynamics are interconnected. However, the global circulation of knowledge about the psyche, including psychoanalysis, psychology, and psychiatry, in East Asia has received limited attention to date. Much literature on psychological sciences in East Asia still privileges diffusionist models that reduce transfer to unidirectional and linear flows, for example West/East, centre/periphery, emission/reception. To illustrate plurality in the sciences and the complexity of circulation during localisation, this presentation explores the East Asian context across the Sinosphere, China, Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea, with a specific focus on South Korea. It delves into the origins of the double translation of the prefix ‘psycho’ into 精神 (chŏngsin) and 心理(simni) by Japanese intellectuals in the late nineteenth century, which generated a distinct configuration of the ‘psy’ sciences: psychiatry (精神醫學) and psychoanalysis (精神分析) on the one hand, and psychology (心理學) on the other. The way Western psychological sciences were institutionalised shaped historiography, professional identities, and public perception. Rather than limiting itself to literal translation, the presentation traces the origins of this bifurcation and its implications for the transnational history of psy sciences in East Asia, focusing on the period from the late 19th century to around 1960, drawing on Japanese lexicographic sources, colonial Korean journals, and South Korean institutional records.

Author

• Jimin Choi, University of Cambridge