Page:The art of kissing (IA artofkissing987wood).djvu/11

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THE ART OF KISSING
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phasis on the close love tie uniting mother and child—a tie frequently too close for the good of either. We have pointed out what the great Viennese overlooked: that the first separate male among animals, appearing at about the stage of the barnacles, was produced as a pocket-husband by the much larger female; and that the first separate male thus mated with his own mother. The roots of this mother-and-son complex, horrendously named the Œdipus complex, are found in this fact. Now we learn that the love kiss originated in the maternal kiss, as we might have expected to find.

An old poser is, Which kissed first, the man or the woman? The answer is simple: the woman. The mother's kiss, in the history of the race, preceded the kiss of love, as it does in the case of each one of us.

Another element enters into the kiss as we know it—the impulse to bite, increased during active loving. The teeth are used widely among animals, to grasp the female mate more firmly during the love episode. Of course, with the spread of the feminist movement during the last century, women have taken over much of man's activity, in all lines. Thus when we read references to a "biting blonde" we do not understand a blond Nordic sheik, but one of the sex long libeled as gentler.

The Two Kinds of Kisses.—Throughout the world there are two main varieties of kisses: the touch, tactile, or lip kiss, osculus Europeanus, and the nose or olfactory kiss, osculus Asiaticus. Most of this study will be devoted to the lip kiss: but the first lesson in the art