brushing his cheek, letting him touch their breasts, touching his penis. But in each case, as he tried in the dream to move into actual love-making, these figures rebuffed him… each of these discrete attractions—the breast, the cheek, the longing—was important.
Berry argues that the cheek functions as an autonomous imaginal detail in dreams of unrequited desire, whose psychological significance resides in the incompleteness of contact rather than in any consummation it might lead toward.
, Echo’s Subtle Body: Contributions to an Archetypal Psychology, 1982thesis