The Symbolism of Teeth in Dreams1

In a short communication entitled 'On the Meaning of Losing Teeth in Dreams', which Dr. Lorand presented to the New York Psycho-analytic Society in 1948, he stated about such 'typical' dreams that they all express a basic wish, in the deepest layers of the dream, to regress to a state of toothlessness, to earliest infantile life, being nursed by the mother, when the difficulties of reality adjustment and independent functioning were absent. This statement was not meant to exclude all other meanings of such dreams. Quite the contrary; at different stages of the analytic therapy, tooth dreams may and do refer to various unconscious and conscious problems with which the patient is struggling at the time. As Freud (22, p. 53) stated: 'When the interpretation of a dream has been discovered, it is not always easy to decide whether it is a "complete" one—that is, whether further preconscious thoughts may not have found expression in the same dream.' And a few lines further Freud continues: 'one must become accustomed to a dream being thus capable of having many meanings.' At another point he states that he finds truth in all main types of interpretation and that if we uncover the dream's motivation source, we shall obtain unexpected information about the repressed impulses in the unconscious, and that in the dream there are many layers in each of which one meaning will be the true one.

Memories, wishes, and fantasies which form the content of dreams always contain regressive elements which relate to various levels of emotional functioning. The memories show traces relating them to situations and stages of infantile and child development. Tooth dreams inevitably bring up associations and memories of feelings of loss, fantasies and memories having to do with oral functions, deprivations, and bitterness. The removal of a tooth in the dream ean easily represent symbolically losing the nursing nipple. The universal desire to regress to that earliest pleasure object—th