In our last post we looked at the element of touch and the role it plays in the burgeoning relationship between Hilary Clinton and Barack Obama. Now, we want to explore a play of expressions on and around their mouths. Our mouths are exquisitely sensitive reflectors of emotion. They go into an "O" of surprise and fear; they tremble when we're about to cry; they form a tight line when we're angry. Fortunately, they also spread wide and turn up when happiness is purring inside us or when we see a beloved.
A hundred years ago it was very controversial when Freud and others circulated a breakthrough insight: the oral area often reflects, and even carries in the very shape of it, long-ago dramas in our early nursing and feeding experience. These dramas, and the unconscious decisions we make during them, later shape how close we allow ourselves to get in relationships and how we interact with the world in general. Therapists often see three clinical extremes of life-shaping oral issues: Oral-Unsatisfied, Oral-Deprived and Oral-Aggressive. Sometimes these early life-scripts can be seen in the actual configuration of the person's mouth, leading clinicians to speak of "mouth-set" as well as mind-set.
We don't see any of these extremes in the mouth-set of either Obama or Clinton. We'd like to invite our readers to confirm our observation or comment on things we might not be picking up on. The person with Oral-Unsatisfied issues carries an attitude of "Nothing is ever quite right" while the person with a Deprived background often approaches life with an attitude of "I give up--I'll never get my needs met." In the Oral-Aggressive person whose early life experience with feeding was accompanied by anger, the resulting attitude is along the lines of "Nobody's gonna mess with me." None of these attitudes can be seen at play in the relationship between Hilary Clinton and Barack Obama.
Friendship Or Flirtation?
At this stage of their relationship, it's not possible to tell if their smiles, touches and overall comfortable way of being with each other will lead to a genuine friendship. That's our hope, because these two remarkable people could work a great deal of practical magic through the synergy of their talents. We're holding a hope that the "no-drama" approach of Barack Obama will infect Hilary Clinton, whose brilliance has at times been obscured behind a steam-cloud of drama.
Are their smiles and touches genuine or a show for the cameras? We had a memorable experience once on a television show, hosted by Sally Jessy Raphael, where we had been invited to comment on the body-language of a couple of entertainers who were being accused of nefarious activities. One was Michael Jackson, who had just been accused of sexual molestation but had not yet been to trial. The other was Tonya Harding, a figure-skater who had been accused of involvement in harming a rival skater. They both had publicly proclaimed their innocence, and it was the video of these proclamations that we were asked to comment on.
We pointed out a lot of guilty body-language, signals that spoke as loudly to us as if they had both written "I DID IT!" on their foreheads in red lipstick. Another expert on the show, whose name we can't recall, lit into us vigorously, defending both Jackson and Harding, and branding us as picky charlatans. Time vindicated us, of course, but we'll never forget the other expert's parting comment to us, delivered on the Manhattan sidewalk after the show as we waited for a cab. The expert rushed up to us and said, "Hey, all that was just for the show. The producers asked me to be controversial. I actually love your work."
It was early in our television experience, and we had not yet learned to tell the difference between sincere words and those that had been uttered "just for the show." Several hundred shows later, we've learned to tell the difference most of the time. In the relationship between Hilary Clinton and Barack Obama, our observation is that their comfort around each other is not "just for the show." We hope we're right, because a genuine friendship and collaboration between them could change the world dramatically for the better.
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