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Abstract
Cannibalistic fantasies underlie some core concepts in psychoanalysis: identification, incorporation, and melancholia. Freud (1917) saw melancholia as an incorporation of the object by devouring it, and Julia Kristeva (1989) takes the melancholic cannibalistic imagination to be a repudiation of loss, a destruction better to possess the object. Cannibalism emerged for the author as a useful concept in an attempt to understand the double dynamics of trichotillomania and trichophagy as destructive disconnection followed by incorporation of the hair, a magical reconnection of what was disconnected, to establish a bond with the mother/analyst. The paradoxical passion of consuming the object of desire, symbolized here by hair, which resembles the umbilical cord, the connection to the maternal object, captures the cannibalistic fantasy of never losing the object by destroying it.