The Unconscious Impulse to “Eat Babies Alive”: What Does It Mean?

Why do we say that and why doesn’t it freak us out?

Gemini AI image of that lady in church who wants to eat your child.

Cannibals don’t eat people because they’re hungry.

Now yes, this happens when a flight of Brazilian soccer players goes down in the mountains of Medellín, but that isn’t the type of human consumption we’re talking about here, literally or symbolically.

We use the language of consumption quite commonly without thinking twice. A person can be consumed by their work or consumed by jealousy. Sitting at dinner with some friends, they remarked how weird it was that people talk about wanting to “eat up the cutest little chubby babies.” Sure, when you take it literally and step back trying to figure out why people say that, of course it would be weird to literally eat a toddler.

But that is not what anyone really means, and we all somehow know that. There is no epidemic of people killing and eating infants.

“Conscious realization is ‘acted out’ in the elementary scheme of nutritive assimilation, and the ritual act of concrete eating is the first form of assimilation known to man.” — Erich Neumann, The Origin and History of Consciousness

We’ve all been “hangry” at some point in our lives and have experienced the complete…