Andrey Syzdykov
Response paper # 2 – Option #2
In chapter 2 of “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” written by Sigmund Freud, he talks about a game of “disappearance and return” later to be known as fort da. This game is important to Freud’s ideas because it essentially counters his pleasure principle, which states that people tend to do things to further their own pleasure while avoiding all forms of pain. This said counter to the pleasure principle appears in the first part of the game, which is the disappearance part. The toddler throws the wooden reel out of sight, which signifies the loss of his mother. He then reels it back in to “reunite” with his mother. Freud wonders why the boy chooses to willingly hurt himself by recreating the loss of his mother into a game, and in the end figures that it’s all for the return stage. After all, there is no return without separation.
This can relate to Plato’s “allegory of the cave” in the sense that the baby, when deprived of his “object happiness” (his mother), he then reverts into the imagination stage to seek a form of comfort. This serves as a temporary form of happiness until the mother returns. What makes this relevant to us is that we often revert to the imaginary stage to keep us happy as well. If you are hungry but can’t get food at the moment, you compensate by imagining the tastes of different foods inside your mouth. If you want sex but can’t get it, you may turn to pornography and imagination (onanism). These examples, as base as they are, show us that you can fool yourself into achieving a temporary happiness. Yet is this imaginary trick really enough to make you truly happy? Also, are there some things out there that you just can’t use this trick for?
