A psychology club in Hankuk Academy of Foreign Studies called ‘The Guardians’, conducted a psychology conference in HAFS on June 9th. This was their 2nd time handling this psychology conference and it was completely controlled only by the students in HAFS, including members of the Guardians, and volunteers of HAFS students. There were four sessions in the conference which were Conscious Psychology, Social Psychology, Commit Psychology, and Mental Analysis. There were 75 participants who were from both middle school and high school, and they chose what session they want to participate in the primary state. I chose ‘Mental Analysis’ since I am deeply interested in mental diseases, including Schizophrenia, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Autism Spectrum Disorder, ADHD etc.
 The opening ceremony started at 2 p.m., in the audiovisual room. We received some guidelines about the activities that we were about to do in each session, and we were also informed about precautions. Then, we moved to each classroom and took a class about each session. Club members of HAFS Guardians were teachers and they taught us about all kinds of mental diseases. They divided those into 8 categories which were Neurodevelopmental Disorders, Schizophrenia, Bipolar Disorder, Major Depressive Disorder, Anxiety Disorder, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Somatic Symptom Disorder, and Personality Disorder. They briefly told us about their symptoms and causes, but I felt sad that there weren’t vivid description and concrete scientific explanation. Since I have been studying those mental diseases in a perspective of neuroscience, I felt that the session was a bit lacking in its’ professionalism.
 For the next activity, we watched a little clip of movie, ‘Perfume: The Story of a Murderer’, and analyzed with the information that we learned from the previous lecture. I presented my own analysis as well, describing what kind of circumstances had made the main character, ‘Grenouille’, to kill ladies with good body odor. I thought that Grenouille’s ego, superego, and id weren’t formed in a proper way due to his underprivileged childhood. But because of his brilliant sense of smell, his libido was thoroughly on the olfactory nerve and this made him to be solely obsessed with smell. While watching the movie, I thought his ego was scent, superego was perfume, and his id was the sense of smell itself. At the very last scene of the movie, Grenouille shed a drop of tear when he goes to the scaffold since he was accused by killing many ladies, and I thought it meant lots of things. Even though he made the perfect perfume that made everyone in the plaza fall in love each other, he realized at the very last moment that what he desired for his entire life was not a perfume but a true love from other people including his mother.
  Around 5 p.m., whole activities were done in each session, and we gathered again in the audiovisual room to do a closing ceremony. I got the certificate of award for the best participant and best analyzer. After we celebrated the successful end of the conference, we took some pictures together. Although some parts of the conference weren’t very admirable, the purpose of letting students more aware of psychology through the conference was very meaningful. I spent beneficial time arranging various types of mental diseases and presenting my neuroscientific analysis about the diseases found in the movie. It also gave me an idea to hold a conference of my club, ‘Brain’, and I’m looking forward to hold the ‘1st Brain Science Conference’ next year.

 
 








Hee Ju Kim
Grade 10th
Hankuk Academy of Foreign Studies