A Kleinian analysis of Lamentations

The Book of Lamentations is incoherent, illogical, unstable and contradictory, with disjunctive and unitary tendencies. There have been many attempts to define its tensions. They all have something interesting to say, but some are more persuasive than others. I read Lamentations as a lament over the severing of an individual’s bond with his God, which reprises the severing of the bond with his mother and loss of his idealised good object. Of Lamentations’ various tensions, I highlight the tension between form and content – a highly controlling (unitary) acrostic form and a highly labile (disjunctive) emotional content. I relate these to Melanie Klein’s ‘depressive’ and ‘paranoid-schizoid’ positions, two configurations of early experience, which are constructed from the psychological mechanisms of projection and introjection. I consider Klein’s view that art is an attempt to repair the internal object, which arises in the guilt of the depressive position. I also consider the work of art critic Adrian Stokes, who draws heavily on Klein, and for the first time extend his celebrated distinction between modelling and carving into poetry, arguing that the acrostic is a literary version of stone. I contend that Lamentations is a form of survival literature whose acrostic performs several important, complex, unconscious, functions related to the Poet’s need to control and repair the sources of his emotional pain. The tension between the unstable shapelessness of emotional pain found in its content and the firm acrostic lines of the recreated object found in its acrostic form are a literary equivalent of the tension between the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions. The acrostic becomes a substitute object, which needs to be carefully preserved. While the conscious hopefulness of Lamentations has been over-read, the Poet’s use of the acrostic to draw a perfect and undamaged breast makes Lamentations a powerful, unconscious, expression of hope.