This book presents a psychosocial exploration of the Vietnamese audience reception of romantic Korean television dramas (K-drama), a genre central to the global spread of South Korean pop culture known as the Korean Wave. Featuring case studies of individual viewing experiences of male and female participants interviewed in 2019, it focuses on the themes of lack and play conceptualised by Jacques Lacan and Donald Winnicott, alongside ideas from other influential psychoanalytic thinkers. It unravels the psychosocial impact of Korean television romance, which has established an enduring presence in Vietnam since the late 1990s. This development has taken place amid the country’s transition towards capitalist-driven socio-economic tendencies and influenced local viewers’ explorations of romantic emotions imbued with loss, longing, and nostalgia. The study adopts a psychosocial approach marked by the psychoanalytically informed biography-based ‘free association' narrative interview model and interdisciplinary interpretive methods involving sociology, psychology, psychoanalysis, and cultural studies.

This engaging work offers fresh insights into a cultural phenomenon that appeals to scholars across the social sciences, particularly those working in media audience research, psychoanalysis, gender studies, the Korean Wave, and Vietnamese studies.

Thi Gammon holds a PhD in Media Studies from Victoria University of Wellington. Her work has been published in multiple journals including Asian Studies Review, Journal of Gender Studies, Celebrity Studies, Studies in Gender and Sexuality, Sexuality & Culture, Feminist Media Studies, Journal of Cultural Geography, and Journal of Psychosocial Studies. Most of Gammon’s research discusses contemporary Vietnamese society and culture, especially issues regarding gender relations and identity in response to global media and the global impacts of the Korean Wave.