ABSTRACT
The original version of this chapter was a presentation that I delivered at the conference of the International Federation for Psychoanalytic Education in New York in 1999. In deciding what to entitle that presentation, I vacillated between “A Child Is Being Eaten” and “A Baby Is Being Eaten.” “A Child Is Being Eaten” would have been an almost verbatim allusion to Freud’s “A Child Is Being Beaten.” Finally, however, I decided on “A Baby Is Being Eaten,” because I wanted to discuss a dream from Joyce McDougall’s Theaters of the Body (1989) – a dream in which a baby is being eaten. After I had proposed the presentation for the conference and had submitted that title, I happened to notice that in McDougall’s Theaters of the Mind (1985) one of the chapters, the subject of which is an entirely different case, bears the subtitle “A Child Is Being Eaten.” Had I, by cryptomnesia, been subliminally prompted to plagiarize from McDougall? Or had McDougall and I independently felt an urge to indulge in an identical pun?
