Monday, June 09, 2008

Affairs of the Lips: Why We Kiss


In the January issue of Scientific American Mind, Chip Walter wrote an article on Why We Kiss. All in all it was interesting, but not anything that made me stop to think. Here's a bit from the beginning.
Key Concepts
  • A kiss triggers a cascade of neural messages and chemicals that transmit tactile sensations, sexual excitement, feelings of closeness, motivation and even euphoria.
  • Kisses can convey important information about the status and future of a relationship. At the extreme, a bad first kiss can abruptly curtail a couple’s future.
  • Kissing may have evolved from primate mothers’ practice of chewing food for their young and then feeding them mouth-to-mouth. Some scientists theorize that kissing is crucial to the evolutionary process of mate selection.

When passion takes a grip, a kiss locks two humans together in an exchange of scents, tastes, textures, secrets and emotions. We kiss furtively, lasciviously, gently, shyly, hungrily and exuberantly. We kiss in broad daylight and in the dead of night. We give ceremonial kisses, affectionate kisses, Hollywood air kisses, kisses of death and, at least in fairytales, pecks that revive princesses.

Lips may have evolved first for food and later applied themselves to speech, but in kissing they satisfy different kinds of hungers. In the body, a kiss triggers a cascade of neural messages and chemicals that transmit tactile sensations, sexual excitement, feelings of closeness, motivation and even euphoria.

Not all the messages are internal. After all, kissing is a communal affair. The fusion of two bodies dispatches communiqués to your partner as powerful as the data you stream to yourself. Kisses can convey important information about the status and future of a relationship. So much, in fact, that, according to recent research, if a first kiss goes bad, it can stop an otherwise promising relationship dead in its tracks.

Some scientists believe that the fusing of lips evolved because it facilitates mate selection. “Kissing,” said evolutionary psychologist Gordon G. Gallup of the University at Albany, State University of New York, last September in an interview with the BBC, “involves a very complicated exchange of information—olfactory information, tactile information and postural types of adjustments that may tap into underlying evolved and unconscious mechanisms that enable people to make determinations … about the degree to which they are genetically incompatible.” Kissing may even reveal the extent to which a partner is willing to commit to raising children, a central issue in long-term relationships and crucial to the survival of our species.

The rest of the article builds on this beginning and explains the key points.

In the new issue, June/July, Augustus F. Kinzel (a Freudian psychoanalyst) wrote a letter to the editor about that article, offering a highly divergent take on the meaning of a kiss. The letter isn't available online, so here is the key section (I added some links for possibly unfamiliar terms):
As a psychoanalyst, I find that the concept of incorporation goes much further in explaining the good-kiss experience than biology can. The couple's unconscious minds have been primed by attachment to incorporate the other person. In the kiss, they each take in the other's "good stuff," symbolized by each other's perceived oral quality. It is the rich lushness of the other's inner being that begins to feel augmenting and transformative to them both. They feel intensely graced by the presence of the other's qualities inside them.

The assimilation of the good other seems so instantaneously pleasurable as to be miraculous. But it is simply that when the unconscious mind incorporates the other, the act appears to the conscious mind like a magical process. Likewise, if the unconscious mind does not get enough preliminary signals of "good stuff," there will be no incorporation, and the kiss will not be magical, although it may still be erotically good.
Damn, gotta give it to the Freudians for making something as magical as kiss seem weird and cannibalistic. But then, when you think about, well, it's better not to think about it.


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