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Freud says in one place: “It is very interesting that among primitive men circumcision is combined with or replaced by the cutting off of the hair and the drawing of teeth, and that our children, who cannot know anything about this, really treat these two operations as equivalents to castration when they display their fear of them.”
“Castration and masturbatory fantasies (fellatio and cunnilinguis),” according to Jelliffe, “are frequently associated with dreams of ‘losing a tooth.’”
In Freud's “General Introduction to Psychoanalysis” we find the following passages: “A particularly remarkable dream symbol is that of having one's teeth fall out, or having them pulled. Certainly its most immediate interpretation is castration as a punishment for onanism…. Especially noteworthy, however, is the representation of onanism, or rather the punishment therefor, castration, by the falling out or pulling out of teeth, because there is a parallel in folk-lore which is probably known to the fewest dreamers. It does not seem at all questionable to me that the practice of circumcision common among so many peoples is an equivalent and a substitute for castration. And now we are informed that in Australia certain primitive tribes practice circumcision as a rite of puberty (the ceremony of the boy's coming in age), while others, living quite near, have substituted for this act the striking out of a tooth.”
“The idea of teeth, in dreams,” writes Jones, “is often symbolically related to that of child birth, a connection that is hardly ever found in consciousness; in the Song of Songs we read: ‘Thy teeth are as a flock of sheep, which go up from the washing, whereof every one beareth twins, and there is not one barren among them.’”
From these quotations as well as from a great number of illustrative dreams, as reported and analyzed by Freud, Stekel, Rank, Stragnell