Developmental Mourning Process in Job’s Suffering: Psychoanalytic Reading of the Book of Job

Abstract

In this paper, Job`s suffering is read through the lens of the developmental mourning process theorized by Freud and Klein who are both psychoanalytic theorists. For Freud, morning means finding out a new object which can substitute the lost object. But, later, he talked about the requisite internalization of the lost object for the healthy inner structure which is one of the characteristics of melancholia. Klein understood mourning process as the positive internalization of the lost object and the re-establishment of the internal good objects using her extraordinary concept of positions, paranoid-schizoid position, and depressive position. The book of Job can be analyzed in terms of this developmental mourning process through which Job lost a perfect God who provides perfect love and security to those who observe religious laws and customs, but, instead, he was able to restore the good internal objects with a new conception of God.