The Process and Meaning of Bereavement and Mourning in the Kang Eul-saeng Version of Heoungaegibonpuri - In Comparison with the Mother-Daughter Relationship in the Film Wonderland (2024)

This study analyzes the characteristics of the bereavement and mourning process depicted in Heoungaegibonpuri(Kang Eul-saeng version) through the lens of Melanie Klein’s concepts of the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions. The narrative reveals a psychological structure of deferred and transgenerational mourning, as the daughter, who experienced the death of her biological mother in childhood, becomes a mother herself and faces loss once again without having psychologically integrated the initial trauma. The ending, in which the world of the living and the world of the dead are severed, evokes the necessity of letting the deceased go, but it falls short of guiding the living toward internalizing the dead as a source of psychological support. In parallel, the film Wonderland, which deals with a similar experience of loss, highlights the potential danger of AI-mediated reunions in impeding the bereaved's confrontation with reality and keeping them trapped in illusion. Both works explore the influence of the deceased’s continued “presence” on the mourning process and point to the consequences that arise when psychological integration of absence is not achieved. However, Heoungaegibonpuri presents the ritual of gut as a means of reconnecting severed ties between the living and the dead, suggesting the possibility of completing an unfinished mourning process. The gut serves as a transformative space in which the deceased can be symbolically internalized, allowing the mourner to recover their vitality. This traditional mechanism of grief carries important implications for contemporary, AI-centered approaches to mourning.