Dreaming of armpits: what can this symbol evoke?

A hidden, moist and scented place

The armpit concentrates the glands that give the body its own scent; they awaken at puberty, together with the hair that helps to spread it. Quietly, it is one of the main places where the body speaks of desire, without a word.

The dream uses it to point to what is intimate and instinctive in us: a truth of the body that we hide, perfume or erase, but that always ends up showing itself.

The scent of the other, and the gesture that protects

Many traditions have turned this scent into a love message: the anthropologist Helen Fisher reports that in Elizabethan times, a woman would give the man she loved an apple kept under her arm, steeped in her scent.

The armpit is also the hollow where we hold a loved one close. In Latin, the same word, ala, meant both wing and armpit, and we still speak of taking someone under one’s wing.

What is seen under the arm changes the reading

• Armpits with abundant hair — a fully alive, instinctive desire that does not try to tame itself. Ancient stories set the hairy being against the smooth one, like Esau the hunter and his brother Jacob: hair stands for vital force and the wild side of the self. Depending on what the dreamer feels, it is a joyful acceptance of one’s nature, or the fear of a sensuality judged too animal.
• Hairless, perfectly smooth armpits — a smooth armpit resembles the armpit before puberty: it erases the visible sign of sexual maturity. The dream may express a wish for purity or control, or conformity to the eyes of others; underarm hair removal only became the norm for women in the 20th century, with the first advertisements of 1915. Sometimes, too, a sexuality kept at a distance.
• A strong smell that cannot be hidden — the fear that one’s desire, embarrassment or emotion will be noticed despite oneself.
• Breathing in the armpit of a loved one — attachment to their intimacy, the need to keep their trace within oneself.
• Raising one’s arms and revealing one’s armpits — exposing oneself, surrendering to the other; or, depending on the context, giving up.
• Holding someone under one’s arm — protecting, keeping close; sometimes holding on to someone more than they wish.
• Excrement in the armpits — the matter of childhood, linked to what Freud called the anal stage (control, the shame of being dirty), mixed with the hair of adulthood: a sexuality that has remained partly immature. In a couple, a relationship that has not yet matured, where desire passes through power struggles rather than through a true encounter with the other (see “Dreaming of excrement”).

A psychological reading, not a ready-made box

Freud believed that by standing upright, human beings pushed the sense of smell into the background of their sexual life, contributing to the repression of desire: the armpit would be one of the last refuges of this instinctive sensuality that civilisation masks. In a more Jungian reading, it belongs to the body’s shadow, what the social façade hides but which is part of the whole person.