Pareidolia as a Major Concept within Threshold Psychoanalysis
- Fabrice LAUDRIN
- il y a 3 jours
- 3 min de lecture
Bulletin of the Franco-Austrian Circle of Psychoanalysis
June 2026 Seminar — Pont-Aven
Pareidolia as a Major Concept within Threshold PsychoanalysisFrom the Earliest Hominins to Present-Day Humanity, from Makapansgat to the Prohibition of the Divine - by Fabrice Laudrin
Abstract
A reddish-brown pebble from Makapansgat, three small red spray-paint spatters on a wall in Quimper, a Cycladic figurine whose marble may once have carried painted features, an emoticon reduced to two points and a curve, an idol that religious tradition refuses to let pass for divine presence: the article brings these distant objects together around one question. At what point does a form cease to belong to the noise of the world and become figure, address, extraction, support or prohibition?
Pareidolia usually refers to the tendency to recognise a meaningful form within an ambiguous configuration: a face in a cloud, a head in a stone, an animal in a stain. This article refuses to treat it as a secondary illusion or a mere psychological curiosity. It approaches pareidolia as an anthropological threshold. Human perception does not receive the world as a neutral surface; it organises it, intensifies it, sometimes tears it away from indifference. A form catches the gaze. The gaze provokes the hand. The hand collects, keeps, moves, reworks or draws. Between seeing and taking, art may find its before.
The Makapansgat pebble forms the starting point of this hypothesis. The object is not carved. It proves neither aesthetic intention, nor constituted symbolism, nor the first work of art. Its force lies in a more radical caution: a natural form may have been collected because it detached itself sufficiently from its milieu to arrest a hominin gaze. The article therefore does not seek the origin of art in the fabrication of an image, but in the older gesture through which a perceived form becomes singular enough not to be left on the ground.
The hypothesis then moves through several regimes of the image. Cycladic figurines show another moment: not the extraction of a natural form, but the fabrication of an anthropomorphic support that painted marks could individualise. The emoticon reveals the minimal power of the face: two points and a curve are enough for the gaze to organise a face. PSD-EXP-003a, drawn from the systematic survey corpus of tagged urban expressions around the Cinéville in Quimper, brings in the contemporary field: three red points become small faces when a second gesture reworks them in black. Pareidolia then leaves the mental space of the observer and returns to the wall as a shareable figure.
The final displacement concerns the prohibition on representing the divine. The article advances a cautious hypothesis: the idol emerges when the human power of facialisation mistakes itself for access to the absolute. The iconic taboo then intervenes as a discipline of the threshold. It does not deny human perception; it prevents perception from confusing what it produces with what exceeds it. Art and taboo respond to the same power: one accepts working with the perceived form, the other protects the gap when that form claims to become divine presence.
This text belongs to the CFAP’s work on trace, support, the threshold of perception and Threshold Psychoanalysis. It proposes that pareidolia should be understood not as an error of vision, but as a fundamental operator in the passage between perception, prehension and image. A stone may become face enough no longer to remain a stone among stones. From this threshold, present-day human beings continue to see faces in clouds, walls, screens, machines and the gods they must sometimes forbid themselves to draw.
To cite this article : Laudrin, F. (2026). Pareidolia as a major concept within Threshold Psychoanalysis: From the earliest hominins to present-day humanity, from Makapansgat to the prohibition of the divine. Bulletin of the Franco-Austrian Circle of Psychoanalysis: Proceedings of the June 2026 Seminar. Franco-Austrian Circle of Psychoanalysis.
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