Job’s Emotional Struggle with the Womb: Some Psychoanalytic Interpretations

Abstract

The womb is invested with great significance in the book of Job. As Job regresses from his extended body, concretised in his children, servants and material possessions, to his own, which is then “eaten into” by his skin problems, he longs to return to it. His fantasies about this womb reflect his unconscious anger, wishes and anxieties, processed by his symbolisation of the womb as a holding and containing grave where he can escape the attacks on his body. As such the womb invites a psychoanalytic study, with even transpersonal-psychological prospects, including that God is somehow, at least unconsciously, associated or even identified with the womb.