When My Korean PhD Supervisor Emails Me, I Become a Child Again
Transference, childhood, and the cultural experience of authority
Three years after completing my PhD, I still experience something difficult to explain whenever I receive an email from my former Korean supervisor. Before I open it, my body reacts. I feel an almost primordial fear, a diffuse anxiety I cannot immediately identify. I want to bow, to show reverence, to make sure I have done nothing wrong. For a moment, I am no longer a researcher with a doctorate and years of professional experience. I become a child waiting to find out whether an authority figure is pleased with me. The reaction seems disproportionate to the situation. The email might contain an ordinary question or a brief comment about my work. My body responds before I know what the message says. I have been trying to understand this experience through the psychoanalytic concept of transference: the re-emergence of feelings and relational expectations associated with earlier relationships within a relationship in the present. But my experience raises a broader anthropological question. What happens when the emotional patterns we develop through our early relationships encounter an institutional and cultural setting that gives authority a particular form? My response may be personal, but the relationship in which it occurs is not simply a private encounter between two individuals.
Learning to love through authority
To contextualize transference, I shall add a few words about myself. I grew up with a strict, emotionally reserved father. He believed that too much praise spoiled a child and that criticism was a fertilizer for growth. When I was older, he explained that his own father, who came from North Korea, had taught him the same philosophy. Too much cuddling, he believed, was incompatible with respect. This did not necessarily mean that love was absent. My father understood care differently. Love could be expressed through consideration, responsibility, and practical acts rather than words of affection or physical closeness. Restraint did not necessarily signify rejection, and criticism could be understood as an investment in a child’s future. At the same time, respect was not entirely separate from love: the relationship carried an expectation that a child should demonstrate respect toward a parent. I can recognise the care embedded in this way of loving while also wondering what it taught me about relationships. If praise risks spoiling a child while criticism helps them grow, approval becomes something to earn and disapproval can acquire the meaning of an opportunity to improve. If affection is expressed through practical care rather than words or touch, emotional distance may become difficult to distinguish from respect. I do not want to reduce my relationship with my father to a psychological explanation, or to assume that his own father’s North Korean upbringing explains his parenting. His account tells me how he understood and justified his actions, not everything that shaped them. Nor can I know precisely how these experiences influenced me. They offer a possible starting point, however, for understanding why certain relationships with authority still evoke such powerful feelings.
When the past enters the present
Transference offers a way to approach this question without assuming that the present relationship is merely a repetition of the past. Earlier relationships can shape what we anticipate from others, how we interpret their behaviour, and how we respond to their approval or disapproval. A neutral comment from an authority figure may feel like a warning to someone accustomed to anticipating criticism. Someone like me who has worked hard to earn parental approval may continue to seek recognition from people whose judgement matters to them.
The concept helps explain why an email can produce a reaction that seems much larger than the immediate event. The message belongs to the present, but the feelings it evokes may have a longer history. This does not make the reaction imaginary or absolve the other person of responsibility for their behaviour. At times, authority figures can genuinely be unpredictable, or dismissive. The task is to distinguish what is happening in the relationship from the meanings that earlier experiences may add to it. In my case, the fear begins before I read the message. I cannot explain it simply by pointing to something my supervisor has written. This timing makes me wonder whether I am responding not only to an individual but also to a relational position that carries emotional significance for me.
The difficulty is that neither personal history nor the immediate interaction provides a complete explanation. Because other foreign professors do not evoke the same feelings in me. The response is specific to my former Korean supervisor, which complicates any explanation based solely on childhood transference. To understand why this particular relationship affects me in this way, I need to consider the social and cultural conditions through which authority becomes recognisable.
Transference is never entirely private
Comas-Díaz and Jacobsen (1991), in their discussion of ethnocultural transference and countertransference, draw attention to the cultural relations that shape therapeutic encounters. Feelings between a client and a therapist may reflect personal histories alongside the meanings attached to cultural identities, social differences, and unequal positions. The therapist also brings cultural assumptions into the relationship. What happens between two people cannot always be understood by examining either person’s psychology in isolation.
Nagai (2009) offers a concrete illustration of how these dynamics can unfold. In one of the cases discussed, an Asian American therapist’s persistent efforts to teach Asian immigrant clients to express their feelings in a supposedly appropriate American way were experienced by a client as demeaning and infantilising. The therapist’s efforts can also be understood in relation to her own position within the American majority culture and the importance of demonstrating linguistic competence and belonging. The interaction therefore involved more than a disagreement about emotional expression. It brought together assumptions about appropriate behaviour, cultural legitimacy, and who had the authority to define competent communication.
Get Dr. Julia Khan’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
These accounts are useful for my purposes because they show how personal feelings acquire meaning within relationships structured by cultural expectations and unequal authority. The relationship between a doctoral student and a supervisor is not a therapeutic relationship: its explicit purpose is intellectual development, research, and academic evaluation. Nevertheless, it can involve a pronounced asymmetry of knowledge and authority. Students depend on supervisors for guidance, feedback, and, in some circumstances, access to academic opportunities. My own experience is different from the therapeutic encounters discussed in this literature, but it is relatable. Perhaps my response to my supervisor is not simply a childhood pattern transferred onto another person. Perhaps that pattern becomes particularly powerful in a relationship already organised by recognisable cultural expectations about authority, respect, and seniority.
In my family, Korea and Korean-ness have long occupied an elevated place in my imagination. I associated it with honour, something almost sacred and something that had to be earned. As a person of mixed Korean and Russian background who lived and studied in South Korea, I was also conscious of my position as someone who did not straightforwardly belong to the national majority. I sometimes understood belonging as requiring me to recognise and reproduce the expectations of a predominantly monoethnic national society. I cannot establish how much this experience shaped my relationship with my supervisor, but it forms part of the context in which I came to understand Korean authority and my own inferior ethnic position in relation to it.
What matters here is that a supervisor is never simply an individual with greater academic knowledge. The position carries institutional and cultural power and may acquire additional social meanings through conventions of respect, obligation, and deference. An interesting point is also to explore how culturally recognisable forms of authority interact with personal histories to shape the experience of a particular relationship.
When a teacher becomes more than a teacher
Cultural psychology offers a way to examine how culturally organised expectations shape relational dynamics. In a cultural-psychological review of Korean parent–child relationships, Choi (2006) discusses relational orientations in which affection and parental devotion coexist with respect, gratitude, and feelings of indebtedness. These relational expectations may provide a cultural framework for understanding not only family relationships but also interactions in other institutional domains, where authority, obligation, and appropriate conduct are similarly negotiated. This raises the question of how parent–child relational schemas may inform relationships with teachers, supervisors, and other authority figures. In academic supervision, parental care and filial obligation may not be directly reproduced, but culturally familiar expectations of respect, reciprocity, and deference may shape how authority is experienced. This perspective could be an answer to how my personal emotional history intersects with culturally patterned relational expectations in Korea.
Taketomo (1989), writing about an American-Japanese psychoanalytic relationship, provides a useful point of comparison through his discussion of “teacher transference”. His account connects his response to an American training analyst with formative educational experiences in Japan. As a later clinical discussion of the case explains, the client’s schooling had contributed to a paternal transference towards an American analyst, reflecting a view of the teacher as a parent. The significance of this example is not that Japanese and Korean educational relationships are interchangeable. Rather, it shows an example from another country of how educational relationships become the context to experience parent-child relational schema.
Based on abovementioned research, how should I understand my experience? Is it an instance of parental transference, in which my former supervisor evokes emotional expectations formed in my relationship with my father? Is it a culturally patterned form of teacher transference, in which the figure of the teacher or supervisor acquires parental significance? Does ethnocultural transference help explain how my mixed Korean and Russian background and my experience of belonging in South Korea shape my submissive response to Korean authority? Or should these dynamics be understood in relation to a wider institutional framework in which educational and professional hierarchies reproduce, activate, or draw upon parent–child relational schemas?
I believe that these are not competing explanations. My early experiences may have made certain forms of authority especially significant to me. Culturally patterned parent–child relational schemas may underpin the hierarchical relationship between teacher and student, conventions of communication, and linguistic practices through which respect and status are expressed in Korean society, activating expectations formed earlier in life. The supervisor’s institutional position and the cultural meanings attached to it provide the conditions in which these expectations form and acquire strong emotional force. In other words, the emotional intensity of the encounter may arise from the overlap of structural, personal, cultural, and social layers that shape the relational world in which I find myself.
References
Choi, I.-J. (2006). 한국의 부모-자녀관계에 대한 문화심리학적 고찰 [A cultural psychological review of Korean parent–child relationships]. Korean Journal of Counseling, 7(3), 761–773. Korean Citation Index
Comas-Díaz, L., & Jacobsen, F. M. (1991). Ethnocultural transference and countertransference in the therapeutic dyad. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 61(3), 392–402. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0079267
Nagai, C. (2009). Ethno-cultural and linguistic transference and countertransference: From Asian perspectives. American Journal of Psychotherapy, 63(1), 13–23. https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.psychotherapy.2009.63.1.13
Taketomo, Y. (1989). An American-Japanese transcultural psychoanalysis and the issue of teacher transference. Journal of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis, 17(3), 427–450. https://doi.org/10.1521/jaap.1.1989.17.3.427
