Publication date:
18 December 2013Length of book:
138 pagesPublisher
Lexington BooksISBN-13: 9780739183021
The Work of Play: Child Psychotherapy in Contemporary Korea is an ethnography that investigates a child play therapy program as it leaves the United States and takes root in South Korea. At the heart of this book is a group of female therapists figuring out how to make a living in an emerging sector while improving the lives of the children they treat. They grapple with questions about maintaining program fidelity while translating and transforming the program to be socially and culturally relevant. Based on years of research, The Work of Play traces how therapeutic expertise is cultivated by combining instinct with formal training. Readers will follow a group of therapists as they form professional roots in the pediatric mental health landscape of contemporary Seoul and see what life is like at the intersection of stigma and demand.
Sheena Nahm's study of play therapy in South Korea engages theories of transnational cultural production through a focus on circuits of professional knowledge. Her subject matter draws readers into a world where the problems of childhood stress are addressed by anxious mothers and psychological professionals, adapting, translating and transforming understandings of gender, family, and the cost/benefit of economic development.