This study was motivated by a question about HwaByung which attacks those who had been emotionally stressed for a long while owing to a feeling of mortification, the environment in which they feel mortification and become emotionally stressed, and t...
This study was motivated by a question about HwaByung which attacks those who had been emotionally stressed for a long while owing to a feeling of mortification, the environment in which they feel mortification and become emotionally stressed, and the reason why they cannot control their anger for a long time and furiously erupt it in their forties and fifties.
Under the patriarchal family system, a female child is regarded as a person who should depart from home some time and become a member of unrelated family, thus, the woman who is brought up as such enters her husband's home and lives as his assistant and a marginal person for the rest of her life. Meanwhile, she had to satisfy the needs and desires of her husband's family members, so she cannot be faithful to her own desire and feeling. Especially, she may have continually felt mortification in the Korean culture which demands her to comply with her parentsinlaw unconditionally. In addition, most women experience conflicts with motherinlaw after her marriage despite a difference in degree, which is considered as a major reason of HwaByung which attacks her.
The traditional society features a rigid and vertical highandlow relationship between motherinlaw and daughterinlaw and an intimate relationship between mother and son. Accordingly, the daughterinlaw had to suffer from a conflict with her motherinlaw onesidedly. In the modern society, however, the patriarchal authoritarianism becomes collapsed, while the highandlow status within the family becoming also weakened, and as a result, a woman's onesided married life in her husband's home becomes to get shown on the surface as a keen competition between her and motherinlaw.
The analysis of this conflict between motherinlaw and daughterinlaw by means of Bowen's theory shows that the newly married woman's status is unstable, but as she gives a male child, she gets to be recognized by her husband's family members. But soon, she forms a closely intimate relationship with her child, a basis of her status, and begins to attach to him, since she gets estranged from her husband owing to the triangulation with her husband and motherinlaw. This triangulation is handed over generation after generation. The self of the son forming an intimate relationship with his mother is not differentiated, and naturally he is likely to cut the emotional relation with his spouse according to the relational type inherited from his parents' generation. Moreover, this is reinforced by the social ethos such as confucianism and patriarchal system.
Accordingly, it is important to heighten the level of differentiation and undo the triangulation in order to solve this conflict, for which it is required to utilize psychoeducation and genograms. Also, for the purpose of a daughterinlaw's selfassertion, Iposition reinforcement and an anger control training program to train a proper expression of repressed anger for a long time are considered necessary.
This study is a new attempt in that it examines the conflict between motherinlaw and daughterinlaw from the aspect of selfdifferentiation and triangularization using Bowen's family therapy, and thus therapy is intended for improvement of the level of selfdifferentiation and detriangularization.
But more studies need to be supplemented to identify the difference between the woman afflicted with HwaByung owing to the conflict between motherinlaw and daughterinlaw and the woman leading a healthy life under the same environment and condition.