Face

the face stands in a pivotal position at every point along this developmental pathway. At the very beginning — before separation, before there is an object at all — the mother’s face is already there, as that which mediates attachment behavior

Schore argues that the mother’s face is the primary regulatory object of infant neurological development, structuring the orbitofrontal circuit that will govern all subsequent affect modulation.

Schore, Allan N., Affect Regulation and the Origin of the Self: The Neurobiology of Emotional Development, 1994thesis

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Face and character must not coincide; then how conceive their relation? Not as one of identity; as interplay. Aging intensifies the partnership. In old age, they marry.

Hillman distinguishes visible face from invisible character, arguing their relationship is not identity but deepening interplay, consummated only in old age.

Hillman, James, The Force of Character: And the Lasting Life, 1999thesis

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‘Everything shall perish except His face’ (xxviii:88) … the Divine Face and the unchanging Face of a being refer to one and the same Face (wajh). The Face of a being is his eternal hexeity, his Holy Spirit

Corbin reads the Quranic formula theosophically: the divine Face and the essential face of every creature are ontologically identical, making the face the locus of theophanic identity.

Corbin, Henry, Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi, 1969thesis

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The face both reveals and conceals. Is it possible to control the revelations for a desired effect, and if so, are these truly revelations, or, more likely, manipulations?

Hillman interrogates the face as a double agent of disclosure and dissimulation, questioning whether self-presentation can ever escape strategic manipulation.

Hillman, James, The Force of Character: And the Lasting Life, 1999thesis

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The luminous face, the face of day, is the only one that, without understanding it, the common run of men perceive… Their black face, the one the mystic perceives, is their poverty: they have nothing with which to be

Corbin articulates a Sufi doctrine of the dual face — luminous and black — as corresponding to necessary and contingent dimensions of being, visible only to the mystic.

Corbin, Henry, The Man of Light in Iranian Sufism, 1971thesis

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‘Faces need to be used.’ ‘A face is something that is incomplete: a work in progress … faces need to be used because they are not finished images’

Hillman, citing art historian Elkins, frames the aging face as an unfinished portrait whose completion is the ongoing work of lived experience.

Hillman, James, The Force of Character: And the Lasting Life, 1999thesis

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Prosopagnosia was linked to right-hemisphere lesions … ‘an inability to combine the component features into a configurational facial representation that would uniquely define each face.’ Putting together the parts could not achieve a unique whole.

McGilchrist marshals neurological evidence that right-hemisphere holistic processing is indispensable for individual face recognition, while the left hemisphere handles only fragmented features.

McGilchrist, Iain, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, 2009thesis

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The relatively sudden change that came over the portrayal of the human face in the period beginning in the sixth century BC … the more abstracted, stereotypic and inexpressive gaze … gives way to portraiture which is more individualised, varied, emotionally expressive and empathic

McGilchrist traces historical shifts in facial portraiture to corresponding advances in right-hemisphere functioning, linking neurological evolution to aesthetic individualization.

McGilchrist, Iain, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, 2009supporting

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the maternal gleam … emanates from the eyes of the responsive mother’s expressive and highly stimulating face, and mirrors the excitatory activity of her limbic system. The dyad thus creates a symbiotic ‘merger’ experience

Schore describes the mother’s face as the mediating surface through which mutual gaze creates a limbic resonance that fuses caregiver and infant in a shared affective state.

Schore, Allan N., Affect Regulation and the Origin of the Self: The Neurobiology of Emotional Development, 1994supporting

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Being thus set face to face at various stages, however weak one’s karmic connexions may be, one should have recognized in one or the other of them; and where one has recognized in any of them it is impossible not to be liberated.

The Bardo Thödol employs ‘setting face to face’ as a technical soteriological procedure in which recognition of the luminous presences encountered at death constitutes liberation.

Evans-Wentz, W. Y., The Tibetan Book of the Dead (Evans-Wentz Edition), 1927supporting

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‘What I saw was disturbing. It didn’t look like me, and it didn’t feel like me. Something was lost. A sense of sadness welled up…’ The frown lines, the sleepy look, the sagging cheeks and neck were gone.

Hillman uses the testimony of cosmetic surgery patients to argue that the altered face produces psychological estrangement, suggesting the face carries identity-information not reducible to appearance.

Hillman, James, The Force of Character: And the Lasting Life, 1999supporting

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Around AD 300, however, a fundamental change took place in the depiction of the face. Portraits in stone begin to show a ‘peculiarly abstract’, distant gaze … ‘the features suddenly stiffen in an expressive Medusa-like mask’.

McGilchrist reads the late Roman turn toward rigid, symmetrical facial portraiture as evidence of left-hemisphere dominance displacing the right hemisphere’s engagement with living individuality.

McGilchrist, Iain, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, 2009supporting

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a profound sense of the particularity of the material face as revelatory of spiritual reality … central to which is the contrast between the ideas of what he called totality and the infinite … the infinite, which we can never reach by piling up finite quantities

Louth situates Levinas’s ethics of the face within a theological framework where the particular human face discloses infinity, resisting the totalizing ambitions of Western philosophy.

Louth, Andrew, Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to the Presentsupporting

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the lack of description or depiction of the expressive face, in Homer at least, is not a sign of lack of fellow-feeling or empathy … but it is a consequence of the degree of fusion between self and other, the lack of self-consciousness that Gill describes in the archaic era

McGilchrist argues that archaic culture’s relative inattention to depicted facial expression reflects not emotional poverty but a pre-reflective merger between self and other that precedes the development of self-consciousness.

McGilchrist, Iain, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, 2009supporting

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This Aged of the Aged is represented as a face in profile: always in profile, because the hidden side can never be known. This is called ‘The Great Face,’ Makroprosopos; from the strands of its white beard the entire world proceeds.

Campbell cites the Kabbalistic figure of Makroprosopos to illustrate the mythological motif of the divine face as cosmogonic source, perpetually partially concealed.

Campbell, Joseph, The Hero With a Thousand Faces, 2015supporting

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my gaze which moves over the face, and in doing so favours certain directions, does not recognize the face unless it comes up against its details in a certain irreversible order, and that the very significance of the object … must be linked to its orientation

Merleau-Ponty demonstrates phenomenologically that the face’s meaning is inseparable from its orientation — perception of the face is not neutral scanning but directionally structured recognition.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, Phenomenology of Perception, 1962supporting

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it is possible that some visual stimuli, such as the sight of a smiling face or of an angry face, could be primary reinforcers … there is a population of neurons in the cortex … that categorize face stimuli based on the expression of the face

Konstan, drawing on neurophysiology, notes that certain facial expressions may function as hardwired primary reinforcers, supporting qualified universalism in the study of facial emotion signals.

David Konstan, The Emotions of the Ancient Greeks: Studies in Aristotle and Classical Literature, 2006supporting

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while our faces undeniably display emotions, it doesn’t automatically follow that all basic emotions cause involuntary facial expressions … Your face is also capable of adopting an expression you’re not feeling

Burnett problematizes the classical view that facial expressions are reliable involuntary indices of discrete inner emotions, complicating the one-to-one mapping assumed by basic-emotion theory.

Burnett, Dean, The emotional brain lost and found in the science of, 2023supporting

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treatment of trauma requires a new model distinct from the traditional psychotherapeutic strategies of face-to-face dialog in order to trigger the calm states associated with the social engagement system

Porges argues that conventional face-to-face therapeutic dialogue can retraumatize because the traumatized nervous system misreads the encounter as threat, necessitating alternative portals to social engagement.

Porges, Stephen W., The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological Foundations of Emotions, Attachment, Communication, and Self-Regulation, 2011supporting

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an urge, even a hunger, for face-to-face contact emerges … many traumatized individuals also need particular guidance to negotiate this intimacy barrier

Levine identifies the emergence of a desire for face-to-face contact as a marker of recovery from trauma, but notes that this desire carries its own therapeutic hazards requiring careful negotiation.

Levine, Peter A., In an Unspoken Voice: How the Body Releases Trauma and Restores Goodness, 2010supporting

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Other-directed gestures significantly decreased from play to still-face … Self-directed gestures significantly increased from play episode to still-face and decreased from still-face to the reunion episode

Lanius presents empirical data from the still-face paradigm showing that the withdrawal of the responsive face triggers measurable self-regulatory compensatory behavior in infants.

Lanius, edited by Ruth A, The impact of early life trauma on health and disease the, 2010supporting

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Meeting in person allows relationships to be woven through and through, via all the senses … including cues of emotional color changes of the face, and subtle bodily signals to be seen and responded to with immediacy and love.

Estés invokes the face as the locus of embodied relational knowing, privileging in-person encounter over mediated connection for the transmission of emotional and psychic information.

Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Ph D, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017aside

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the right hemisphere contains neural representations of species-typical facial expression, prosodic contours, and gestures

Schore cites neuropsychological evidence for right-hemisphere specialization in encoding facial expressions as part of a broader account of socioaffective stimulus processing.

Schore, Allan N., Affect Regulation and the Origin of the Self: The Neurobiology of Emotional Development, 1994aside

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