The Seba library treats Forehead in 5 passages, across 3 authors (including Onians, R B, Freud, Sigmund, Plato).
in the belief that the genius was in the head and in the touching of the forehead in referring to him… we have probably the origin of the curious Roman custom of rubbing the forehead when blushing.
Onians argues that the Roman gesture of rubbing the forehead when blushing originates in the belief that the genius inhabits the head, making the act a propitiation of the indwelling daemon whom shame has disturbed.
, The origins of European thought about the body, the mind,, 1988thesis
whenever his father was tormented by business worries or financial difficulties, he had been in the habit of pressing his hands against his forehead, as though he felt that his head was too wide.
Freud records how a patient’s dream of an incorrectly proportioned sculpted head is overdetermined by a childhood memory of the father’s compulsive gesture of pressing his forehead under stress, demonstrating the forehead’s role as a somatic site of condensed psychic content.
, The Interpretation of Dreams, 1900supporting
even as more extremely he might humble his head by laying his forehead in the dust.
Onians situates prostration of the forehead to the ground within a continuum of humbling gestures involving the knees and head, all expressing submission of the life-soul to a superior power.
, The origins of European thought about the body, the mind,, 1988supporting
the sinews, again, on the same principle and for these reasons, were set by the god all round the neck so far as to the base of the head.
Plato’s cosmological anatomy of the head’s structural sinews and coverings provides an indirect framework within which the forehead’s differential flesh-thickness reflects the proximity of rational soul to bodily surface.
, Plato’s cosmology the Timaeus of Plato, 1997aside
those which had the least life within them in the thickest and most solid flesh… that it might not, by being crowded and pressed and matted together, destroy sensation by reason of its hardness, and impair the memory.
Plato’s principle that rational and sensitive regions of the head are covered with minimal flesh provides the cosmological ground for understanding the forehead as a zone of maximal psychic exposure.
, Timaeus, -360aside