Abstract
The purchase and consumption of bottled water in Australia is difficult to understand. Apart from the scare in Sydney some years ago, this country has enjoyed a clean palatable supply of drinking water. This unnecessary practice was initially dismissed as the manipulation of the gullible by the purveyors of style.
However, are there possible psychosexual factors? Initially people unscrewed bottle caps and drank from the bottle. More recently these ubiquitous bottles have been equipped with sealable ‘nipples’, which are sucked.
During the oral stage, mother's breast is not only the source of nutrition, but of love and security. The symptoms of oral fixation have been listed as constant chewing (pencils), smoking, overeating and excessive drinking [1]. In this enlightened age of information technology, there is hardly a pencil to be seen and smoking, overeating and excessive drinking are no longer socially condoned. We propose that the unacceptable cigarette has been replaced by the commercially available, stylish, nippled bottle of water.