What do we see? Images, Perceptions or Persons

I heard a statement in a movie once - The real magic is in the mind of the people. People don't see past the illusions because, they don't want to.
Think of this after seeing a kid's magic show or an optical illusion.

With respect to people also, do we see people as they are or we impose on them what we want to see, thus ending up seeing what we want to see rather than what is?
Thinking of all the people, particularly the people one is often close to, I think, we often have a fixed perception of that person, often based on the role they perform like mother, wife, husband, daughter, boss, HR manager, trainer, teacher, etc. This prevents us from seeing the person as a person with all the attributes of that individual himself or herself

Experiment - Think of your mother. What words come to mind? love, care, concern, nagging, patience, grace, etc?
Try imagining how she would have been as young lady, bubbling? giggling? full of energy? beautiful? hot? sexy? how would she have attracted attention of the boys?
'Aint it difficult to imagine?!
But unless one sees her as an individual who has all the parts any normal individual has, wouldn't we be living in an illusion. Would our relationship be with that person or our concept of that person?
I believe that if the relationship with person, one would be able to accept the variations, different parts of that person, basically the entire person. Consequently, one could get more from the relationship, things one did not expect too.
On the other hand if one builds a relationship with an incomplete image, it is bound to take huge beatings, and will take huge and continuous effort on both parties to maintain that image.

Carl Jung worked a lot on this - the Anima and Animus of men and women respectively, i.e Anima - the image of woman in the man and the Animus - the image of man in the woman
According to him, a man would have an image of women in his mind built by his experience of women (like mother). He would then typically search for a woman who is closest to this image and then impose this image on her. Effectively, his relationship would be with this image that he has developed and not with that person. It is of course vice versa with women.

What he encouraged was to learn more of one's own shadow (anima or animus), relate with it. This would automatically decrease the need to impose the shadow on the spouse. One can then build a relationship with the actual person which is 100 times more satisfying.

That sounds a long journey!
Wikipedia on Carl Jung' s Anima and Animus
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anima_(Jung)#Levels_of_animus_development