Body Exchanges in the Book of Job: A Transactional-analytical Perspective

Abstract

Although the prosaic frame before and after the poetic, main body of the Job narrative mentions two sets of children, one can question this and explain the change as psychological development in the parental figure, Job, himself. There are at least three clues to this: Job receives more in the end than he lost in the beginning, yet the number of his children remains the same; there is no mention of Job's wife being traumatised by the loss of her children and as there is no mention that Job's body is healed, it remains uncertain if he could still father children. Instead, the repeated substitutions especially in the sacrificial sections suggest that Job empathically identifies with the threatened bodies of others so that he inevitably becomes a sacrificial victim himself. Through his traumatic bodily experience, he matures and shifts to a more adult-like ego state where bodies are mentally exchanged.