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Pacifiers, thumbs and their adult counterparts are making a surprising comeback, both in the media and on social networks. What does psychoanalysis, and its major figures, have to say about this trend?
Once confined to the private world of early childhood, this scene has now entered the public eye: on TikTok, adults share their “comfort moments,” thumb in mouth or a trendy pacifier between their lips, openly embracing a return to childhood or the soothing pull of regression. In one viral video, viewed more than three million times, a young woman explains why she never gave up her pacifier: “It’s the only thing that calms me down.” Another, a high-powered executive, admits on Instagram to using a “night pacifier” to fight insomnia and anxiety attacks.
Entire forums are devoted to “paci adulting,” where adults, often isolated by emotional distress, share photos of their collections and calming rituals. Mainstream media has picked up on the trend, alternating between mockery and attempts at analysis. Le Monde, Slate, The Guardian, TF1, CNews and Vice have all run stories on this “embraced regression.” The pacifier, once a silent accessory in the crib, now appears in adult selfies, serving as a totem of emotional discomfort that, paradoxically, speaks volumes.
How can we interpret this behavior that goes far beyond the crib and into the emotional lives of adults?
Since Freud, sucking has been understood as a language of both body and mind. It occurs, as is well known, during the oral phase, the first stage of psychosexual development. The child derives pleasure not only from feeding (nutritive sucking at the breast) but also from sucking itself (non-nutritive sucking). As early as 1905, in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, Freud noted, “The pleasure derived from sucking the breast or thumb does not end with the satisfaction of nutritional needs, but continues, purified of any purpose, as erotic pleasure.” Oral activity thus represents the primitive stage of desire, with the mouth as its first arena.
Building on Freud, Winnicott focused on the transition from the mother’s breast to external objects. For him, the pacifier, thumb or comfort object functions as a “transitional object,” a bridge between the infant’s sense of omnipotence and the outside world. Sucking here expresses the child’s ability to soothe themselves, to tolerate the frustration of absence, while still holding on to the memory of the original satisfaction.
René Spitz, renowned for his work on hospitalism, observed how sucking, even without milk, soothes a child deprived of maternal presence. In The First Year of the Child’s Life, he describes these self-soothing gestures as a desperate attempt to make up for emotional deprivation, with the mouth serving as the ultimate refuge against separation anxiety.
John Bowlby, the father of attachment theory, took the idea further. He saw the pacifier and the act of sucking not merely as a compensation for absence, but as an “attachment pacifier,” an emotional substitute in a world where maternal support is lacking or unreliable. In this way, the child, when deprived or insecure, invests the object with the comfort and care normally provided by the mother.
More recently, Sylvain Missonnier and other clinicians have highlighted the continuity between fetal sucking (observable in utero as early as the fourth month of gestation) and postnatal sucking. The pacifier and thumb may simply extend this archaic gesture, imprinted in memory even before birth, serving as the foundation for essential bodily soothing.
In children, sucking unfolds as a creative response to separation anxiety and the need for reassurance. The act of sucking evokes both autoerotic pleasure and the search for the other, the maternal, the original rocking and comfort. The pacifier, thumb or corner of a blanket thus becomes a shield against the unsettling strangeness of the world. Yet this soothing behavior is not without its drawbacks. Freud warned of the risk of oral fixation. When a child, lacking alternative psychic strategies, remains attached to the initial source of satisfaction, they may struggle to engage with other forms of pleasure, relationships or defenses against anxiety. Later in life, this fixation can manifest in various forms of addiction, including tobacco, food, alcohol, or even persistent sucking, an unconscious repetition of a defense against an archaic anxiety. It may also signal difficulty letting go of the sense of omnipotent maternal care, or an inability to develop a more complex symbolic understanding of separation that fosters deeper relational bonds. If the transition is poorly managed, the transitional object, rather than being relinquished in favor of a more fully developed psychic life, can turn into a fetish, a barrier to individuation and a permanent refuge from distress.
In adulthood, the return to sucking is not a whim or a trend, but rather rooted in a complex psychic dynamic, where the individual, confronted with the quiet violence of reality, seeks refuge in the folds of their most archaic memories. The adult who, in the dim light of a bedroom or the anonymity of public transport, brings a pacifier to their lips, is not simply imitating a child. Unconsciously, they are attempting to reconnect with a time when the world was, if not entirely fulfilled, at least soothed by the calming power of an age-old gesture.
Since Freud, psychoanalysis has understood regression as a form of psychic survival. When higher-level adaptive mechanisms, such as sublimation, speech or humor fail, the individual falls back on the earliest strategies of their psychic apparatus. Adult sucking then becomes a reactivation of a primary mode of satisfaction, more immediate, more bodily and more complete than anything adulthood can provide.
This return to oral activity is not merely a refuge from anxiety; it is the ultimate attempt to counter the sense of estrangement from oneself, the feeling of emptiness and the sting of abandonment. The oral object – a pacifier or a thumb, but also a cigarette, chewing gum or bitten pens – becomes the universal substitute for lack. It fills, albeit in a precarious and repetitive way, the gap left by absence, the anxiety of fragmentation and the fear of separation. One could consider this the adult continuation of Spitz’s thesis on hospitalism, with the body-mind devising strategies to manage fundamental distress and the mouth, both the gateway to connection and separation, remaining the arena for all improvised solutions.
Modern life, with its relentless pace, paradoxical demands for autonomy and performance, and encouragement of addictive consumer behaviors, has fostered infantilization and weakened traditional defenses. The adult’s psychic space, particularly less structured by collective rituals, often lacks comforting figures. Turning to the pacifier or adult sucking thus serves as a bodily expression of nostalgia for shelter. In this act, the adult becomes a child once more, even an infant, recreating the bliss of satiety and the illusion of a world without rupture, where all anxiety might dissolve in the reassuring rhythm of sucking.
This gesture also belongs to the economy of autoerotic pleasure, which Freud described as the capacity to derive pleasure from oneself, independently of any external object. But whereas a young child uses sucking as a first exercise in mastering anxiety, the adult faces a world whose harshness cannot be softened. Sucking becomes a visible sign of suffering, reflecting the inability to find adequate comfort in emotions, relationships or symbolic life to keep anxiety at bay. It is an attempt, perhaps illusory, to reclaim the security of maternal enfoldment, the original warmth, and a wordless world in which the mouth served as the first refuge, the first shelter against chaos.
A society that values autonomy and self-mastery struggles to recognize this need for careful listening. Yet it is precisely here that the possibility of genuine calm resides – not in the battle against symptoms, but in acknowledging human fragility and supporting the unique paths through which each individual seeks to ward off anxiety.
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