This book analyzes a subtle but intriguing mental event - the paradoxical surprise that people sometimes feel when they come upon something that they have felt sure existed but are seeing for the first time. Noted first by Sigmund Freud, this common but odd experience proves remarkably resistant to trivial explanation.

Susan Sugarman probes this experience and its relation to other everyday sensibilities, such as the pleasure of re-encountering the familiar and people's fascination with authenticity. Although the experience manifests itself in a seeming lapse in logic and remains obscure in a way that one might - and that Freud did - associate with pathological formations, it is neither illogical nor pathological. On the contrary, it observes a moment of mental health and personal integration.

Similar to approaches in modern philosophy and linguistics, Sugarman's analysis is applied here accessibly and in ordinary terms to concrete behavior and experience. As a result, thought and feeling, normally believed to elude systematic inquiry, yield to it, allowing for genuine progress in understanding the human mind.