The story of Job also makes us aware that we have paid a heavy price for our process of individuation. The private self, cut off from sacred union, is very vulnerable, insecure, and prone to either immense guilt and shame or dangerous inflation and illusion. Job is in many ways the beginning of the modern sense of self. He lives the struggle and pays the price in both guilt and defiance. Who of us cannot identify with him? And his loneliness?
