“Adam's Rib”

And the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept: and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof;

And the rib₂ which the Lord God had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man.

And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.

There are, to my knowledge, two outstanding psychoanalytical theories relating to the story of the creation of woman in Genesis. In 1911 Freud pointed to the “peculiar” character of the story, and referred to a suggestion made by Otto Rank that the myth was a reversal of the familiar mother-incest theme.1 Thus, Eve would have given birth to Adam, not the other way around. In The Creation of Woman, Dr. Theodor Reik describes Rank's interpretation as one that explains but does not exhaust the myth. He proceeds in a thorough and engaging manner to demonstrate his own theory that the story is not really concerned with Eve's birth, but is rather a disguised remnant of a version of Adam's rebirth in puberty rites of initiation. He compares the removal of the rib with ritual mutilations which are characteristic of these ceremonies. And he accounts for the ecstatic sleep, the change of name and final possession of a woman, all of which are features of initiations found all over the world.

Dr. Reik's analysis is a compelling account of the anthropological