The Occurrence and Meaning of Dreams of Food and Eating

Abstract

The author studied 229 dreams of food and eating in the context of the psychoanalyses of 4 female patients. The patients'' associations to these dreams revealed a similarity of manifest content and a similarity of latent meanings. In the 1st 3 studied cases where there were adequate numbers of dreams to study statistically, it was discovered that the incidence of this typical dream tended to decrease as the analyses progressed. The possible meanings of this decrease were discussed. The most prominent latent meanings of this typical dream are: (a) as a regressive substitute gratification (oral) for genital satisfaction, and (b) as a symbol of pre-genital fixations on maternal love, support and reward. The latent symbolic meaning of foods in dreams is a rich and diverse source of psychodynamic material. It may well have a bearing on our understanding of certain hysterical conversion symptoms, food preferences, idiosyncrasies and allergies and certain psychosomatic disturbances which involve appetite and upper gastrointestinal functioning. The suggestion is offered that the serial study of such typical dreams throughout the course of analysis may be a useful methodologic approach to research in various aspects of psychoanalysis. Such an approach may be able to encompass simple quantitative relationships and correlations.