After reading chapters one and two of Freud’s “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” I couldn’t take off my mind the idea of the super-serious Sigmund Freud, adored by my entire family of psychologists, looking at a baby and evaluating him. I still can’t decide if its a funny or a creepy image; but, in any case, it is incredibly interesting.
Having five younger sisters I have played the “disappearance and return” game many times, but have never quite understood its meaning, more than it being a phase on a child’s growing process. Freud argues that the child can be punishing someone for leaving by showing strength or even dominance, proposing a challenge. This statement is hard to prove because to do so we must ask ourselves (or Freud) if human nature is as cruel as he says, and also we must think about how much a baby understands of the world that surrounds him/her, which by my own personal experience is much more than what we would think.
However, Freud concludes that first the child is playing to be a grown-up, and second, that every kid will play about those every-day-life things that made an impression on him/her. This observations have a great importance on Freud’s theory because they arouse issues of independence and security, for the child is learning to separate him/herself from the mother; and issues of desire and goals since there is a wish for being older and be able to do what others do, which could also be seen as a problem of identification. Moreover, Freud’s conclusions also speak about how we learn, understand, and respond to what happens around us.
This specific point, although we would not think so as easily because of the time difference between the authors and the scientific interests of Freud, has a lot to do with Plato’s theory, specially with that of the “Allegory of the Cave”. The first relation would be that of the child wanting to do what elders do; or in Plato’s words, what those on the outside do. In his allegory, those inside the cave wanted to do, or at least have the possibility to do the things those on the outside did, as the older people, the ones who could teach them. Another relation would be how the child’s way of understanding and dealing with the world around him/her is to try it by playing. We could say that this is the basis of Plato’s theory, for he marks a difference between the “idea of something” and that “something”, for example the idea of beauty and what is beautiful. In this case the child is impressed by an idea and tries to put it in practice on the “real” world.
Finally, is it possible that this has anything to do with happiness? Yes, indeed, and even relates to happiness in different levels. The first, is a simple happiness given by the pleasure the child gets from the game, to him/her it is definitely fun. The second level is more complex, its composed by the wish of the child of being older, or to have some kind of “revenge”, and being able to get it; as Freud explains. It also has a lot to do with what we want to learn about the world surrounding us, but more over, is this view of the infants way of processing the world still valid? what would have Plato said about it? how conscious was Freud about the implications of this theories? and finally, is his text really about pleasure, or about finding true happiness by achieving our goals, walking out from the cave?.
-Manuela Toro.
