RESPONSE PAPER #2
In Chapter 2 of Freud’s text, he carefully investigates “children’s play,” specifically a game of “disappearance and return” which becomes known as “fort da.” Why do you think this game is so important to Freud’s ideas? How does this compare to Plato’s “allegory of the cave”? And, of course, what does any of this tell us about happiness?
In my opinion, this game is important to Freud’s ideas because it is a clear example of the pleasure principle without any economic aspect. The eighteen months old child knows nothing about money and the economic world thus, in his search of pleasure, it is purely pleasure-seeking. In his game of “fort da”, he makes a wooden reel disappear into his little draped cot by throwing to that side and pulls the string attached back to make it reappear. The one thing that fascinated me was that the child would actually make sounds according to which move he is doing, saying ‘o-o-o-oh’ when throwing the reel and saying ‘da’ to greet its reappearance. The child knew what he was doing. Also, to think that the eighteen months old knew that something has to be gone in order to return blew me away. Freud makes the connection of the reel symbolically being his mother’s departure which then I realized how sad the baby was. No child in that age is happy to say bye-bye to his or her mommy and have fun without her. Thus, it seems clear that the baby was waiting for his mother’s return and the game was in replacement till the actual return of something significant.
Moreover, this passage is similar to Plato’s allegory of the cave because once again we are drawn into the child’s world, observing the baby as Freud did. We have never seen the child but yet, here we are understanding how it feels and sharing his emotions. Also, the eighteen months old baby is similar to the man in the cave because they both are not fully aware of the world around them and is only in the learning mode. This whole not knowing what’s around them led me to think is true happiness in not knowing what’s around us? Are people just to busy trying to calculate the benefits and the non-benefits that they complicate themselves in simple situations? It’s just my opinion but, I learned in my religion that people were created as simple beings but it is us who complicate our minds and choose whether our situation is happy for us or not. I believe this to be correct because happiness is all in the mind. We people are too complicated. We should think simply and look on to the bright side and wait for good things to happen just like the baby. I think Freud in another sense is saying that not knowing is the best because since the baby does not know about other things like what the mother is going through, the economic hardships that his family is suffering, he is just simply sitting there repeating his game thinking nothing else but his mother’s return.
