Response Option: 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 theories, and how does this relate to your own childhood experiences?
Freud’s basic premise of Beyond the Pleasure Principle was that the pleasure principle is what drives all humans; we live, essentially, to only satisfy this need.
However, in the first two chapters Freud addresses the fact that there are unpleasant experiences, but that regardless of the unpleasant experiences an individual can experience in life the “pleasure principle” is always dominant. The pleasure principle is the “concept describing people seeking pleasure and avoiding suffering (pain) in order to satisfy their biological and psychological needs.”
Freud talks about how there may be instances in which there are issues, or rather obstacles in the way of the pleasure principle – situations that the pleasure principle may have some difficulty dealing with. This is where childhood play and “fort da” comes into play.
“Fort da” is a term Freud uses to describe a game played by a child, “fort” meaning “gone” and “da” meaning “there.” The child seemed to get pleasure from “hiding” an object such as A reel of string and then making it appear again. This intrigued Freud because he couldn’t Understand how a child was getting pleasure out of repeating things that would naturally cause unpleasant reactions(the disappearance of object would normally cause unpleasant reactions from an individual).
This is curious to me, however, I don’t necessarily find it as intriguing as Freud because i don’t necessarily believe that the actions of babies can be so easily generalized into a theory that is more concisely applied to that of an adult.
Are there not other instances in which babies, or even toddlers, indulge in activities that are pleasurable to themselves, but may not be so pleasurable to an average individual?
