ABSTRACT
The centrality of the human face as symbolic of personality permeates the fabric of human experience. It is often observed that a full face-to-face sexual encounter is unique to human beings, an event profoundly linked with an earlier structural correlate-the rapt stare of the human infant at the mother's face during feeding. More generally, in many times and places the dualities that make up human experience have often been given compressed focus through representations of the human face. The notion of a wholly undifferentiated state was not found to be useful as a clinical concept. In actual clinical experience areas of union and distinction are always found together. Early in psychoanalytic history the experience of the face was associated with seduction and for good reason. The novelty and felt significance of the smile, the surplus of its expressive coherence, marks a dimension of responsive cognition that goes beyond the range exhausted by animal signalling and consciousness.
