Face recognition is an important technique and has drawn the attention of many researchers due to its varying applications such as security systems, medical systems, entertainment. A face recognition system is one of the biometric information processing systems. The developed algorithm for the facial expression recognition system, which uses the two-dimensional discrete cosine transform(2D-DCT) for image compression and the self organizing map(SOM) neural network for recognition purpose, simulated in MATLAB. By using 2D-DCT we extract image vectors and these vectors become the input to neural network classifier, which uses self organizing map algorithm to recognize familiar faces (trained) and faces with variations in expression. In this paper we have developed and illustrated a recognition system for human faces using a novel self organizing map based retrieval system. SOM has good feature extracting property due to its topological ordering. The facial analytics result for the 25 images of AT &T database reflects that the face recognition rate using one the neural network algorithm SOM is 95.05% for 5 persons.