'On the Meaning of Losing Teeth in Dreams'

A classic anxiety dream of mine involves loosing teeth. It turns out that the symbolism of teeth in dreams is common (Freud called them "typical" because so many people seemed to have almost identical dreams). One of the ealiest attempts at addressing this was in a paper by Antonie Rhan in the Internationale Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse in 1923. He thought that such dreams lead back to the earliest stage of thumb sucking, when the baby has no teeth and enjoys itself without disturbance from reality.

The title of this post is taken from a paper published by Sandor Lorand in the Psychoanalytic Quarterly in 1948. He reports one of his patients' particularly entertaining tooth-dreams:

I have a painful tooth, a lower front tooth, which is abcessed. I put my fingers in my mouth and pull it out. At the root of the tooth and clinging to it is the pus sac of the abcess. I thought in the dream, 'Why, that is just like a penis in a rubber condom with the seminal fluid collected at the end of the condom'.

So of course, Lorand concludes that "her associations to the dream were first to her castrative tendencies toward her husband as well as against herself. This thought led to the expression of her feelings of guilt and responsibility for causing her husband difficulties in attaining his orgasm. I was able to elicit even deeper associations along the following line: first, self-castration, self-deprivation through castrating her husband (by fellatio—biting); then guilt and self-mutilation as punishment. Further..." it goes on. Great stuff.