8th
Plotting for Kisses
A boy of seventeen who has been trying for weeks to work out what it is about his girlfriend that is “driving him mad” — the frustration, that is to say, for which he uses her — arrives at his session in an unusually bumptious mood. He has realized, he announces to me triumphantly, what it is about her: “She doesn’t kiss properly.” He mooches around in his mind for more to say, but to his own surprise he is blank, so I offer him a suggestion: “When people kiss they’ve stopped talking. If her kisses were words, what would they be saying to you?” “You can’t really love someone that you don’t love kissing,” he replies, as though oblivious to my question.
And although there are clearly conventions in literature and life governing the giving and getting of kisses, it is really only from films that we can learn what the contemporary conventions might be for kissing itself. Styles of kissing can be seen but not easily described, as though kissing resists verbal representation. It is striking that, unlike other forms of sexuality, there is little synonymy of kissing. It has generated no familiar slang, acquired virtually no language in which it can be redescribed. It is not merely that in the romance of appetite the details of salivation are not compelling. Apparently for the sake of interest stories often ignore, in a way films do not, the fact that the kiss itself is a story in miniature, a subplot.
From a psychoanalytic point of view, the kiss is a revealing sequence containing a personal history. The way a person kisses and likes to be kissed shows in condensed form something about the person’s character.
So in psychoanalytic terms kissing may be, among other things, a compromise solution to what Freud saw as the individual’s primary ambivalence, and a way of gratifying that other appetite he recognized: the appetite for pleasure independent of the desire for nourishment or reproduction. When we kiss we devour the object by caressing it. Kissing on the mouth can have a mutuality that blurs the distinctions between giving and taking (“In kissing do you render or receive?” Cressida asks in Troilus and Cressida).
