“Finding is just a process of retrieving something that is already there.”
—Sigmund Freud Preamble The theme of loss is recurrent in our dreams: we lose the train, people, the path, and even our balance… And our biggest concern throughout the course of the dream is to seek, to find what has been lost. This anxiety over loss, and the desire to make up for what has been lost, is nothing more than the fear of the dissolution of our identity. So, finding what is hidden reassures us and brings us a fundamental pleasure that goes beyond mere intellectual achievement and satisfaction.
Finding the
latent image hidden in the
manifest image is a mental process related to the concept of the lost object used in psychoanalysis. Finding the object “is just a process of retrieving something that is already there,” asserted Freud in his work “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917).
Hidden figures In this book we will play hide and seek with hidden and camouflaged figures. In nature, camouflage is a visual “noise,” usually made from line or dot patterns that enable creatures to blend in with their surroundings and become imperceptible to predators. Since antiquity, human beings too have tried to camouflage themselves or their properties in order to dupe human predators, such as thieves, spies, soldiers, and so on.
Some hidden-figure illusions involve the figure-ground phenomenon, which refers to the human ability to separate figures or foreground information from a surrounding background or “noise,” which requires a complicated perceptual process by the brain. In your visual field, the main figure and the background actually share the same contour but the brain considers only one field, neglecting the other as being a negative space or an interspace.
Copyright © 2014 by Gianni A. Sarcone (Author). All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
