The term 'face' commands a remarkably diverse field of attention within the depth-psychology corpus, functioning simultaneously as anatomical surface, psychic mirror, theological symbol, and neurobiological interface. Hillman's archetypal psychology treats the face as the site where character and soul negotiate their visible and invisible dimensions — aging progressively 'uses' the face as a medium of portrait-making, while cosmetic intervention interrupts that process. Schore's developmental neuroscience repositions the mother's face as the primordial regulatory object: the orbitofrontal cortex organizes itself around facial stimuli, and the maternal gaze constitutes the infant's first encounter with an external world bearing affective meaning. McGilchrist demonstrates that right-hemisphere lateralization underwrites both the recognition of individual faces and their empathic expressivity, a capacity with traceable evolutionary and art-historical consequences. Corbin and the Sufi metaphysical tradition invest the face with ontological ultimacy: the Quranic 'Face of God' doubles as the eternal hexeity of every being, collapsing cosmological and personal identity into one wajh. The Tibetan tradition employs 'setting face to face' as a soteriological practice — confronting the deceased with luminous presences at liminal moments. Across these registers, the face marks the boundary between interiority and world, between the empirical and the invisible, between the individual and what transcends individuality.
In the library
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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
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
'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
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
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
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
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
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
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
'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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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