You know I keep thinking about the face on that cheese toastie that Jean Marc wrote about a while back. We seem to have an immensely strong urge to see faces everywhere: on the moon, in clouds, even in the most abstract of shapes and doodles. In our minds, the most random of patterns or stimuli seem to readily coalesce into two eyes a nose and a mouth. Every letter ‘O’ at the top of every worksheet gets a smile..Whatever I look at, I cannot but turn it into a face.Maybe it’s because I’ve been trying to wade my way through the work of the philosopher Levinas, who tells us that our view of the world, before reason, before intellect or understanding, is, at it’s heart, based upon a relationship with a face. How many cars have faces? or buildings? Even the dark, maybe, has a face…This strange need to populate our environment with faces can perhaps be explained by our nature as social animals, born primed to interact with our environment as soon as we enter it. It is not enough that we look at the world, it in turn must look back at us.As Jean Marc points out, babies seem primed, cognitively pre-wired, to respond to faces. In attachment theory, facial expression is one of the key elements of a infant’s relationship with others. On an evolutionary level, the adaptive value of facial expression has been well documented by many theorists from Darwin onwards. Maybe on a psychodynamic level, the faces we see are merely projections of our inner anxieties. Everyone has something to say about faces and I can see the value of all of it……All of which enables us to resurrect that classic of “A02 discussion points” – the idea that there are varying levels of explanation with regard to all psychological phenomena and that it’s usually the case that most perspectives will have something to offer in reaching an understanding..