Freud speaks of children’s play as direct satisfaction of impulses. Why then do children play the game of “disappearance and return” which seems to be an anti-impulse? The game literally involves removing something from sight, probably a toy, and then eventually having it reappear. One can look at the bigger picture and see the game as a painful experience, as Freud points out. When a mother leaves a child, it is an utterly painful experience. How is it that a child can relive this experience with the removal of his/her toys and voluntarily do it as well? I believe it is because that child controls the direct satisfaction of the impulse of getting the toy back. If the game involves tying a rope around a toy and hanging it over a ledge thus removing it from sight, the child simply has to pull the rope and the toy reappears. In a sense, the game is creating pain just so that pleasure can be satisfied instantly.
Before reading this excerpt from Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principal, I never even thought about child’s play and the philosophy behind it. After reading Freud’s ideas, I realized that even something that seems as mindless as child’s play is performed for a reason; the reason of pleasure.
In The Ethics of Pleasure by Aristotle, he goes on and on about what pleasure is, how it’s achieved and so on. One of his theories is that pleasure is the end, the conclusion. In other words, everything humans do in life is so that we can achieve pleasure. If it’s working more hours, it’s so that we get more pay so that we can support our family and achieve the “American Dream.” If we play a game like “Disappearance and Return,” it is so that we can satisfy the pleasure of getting our missing toys back instantly. Everything that is done is to avoid pain and achieve pleasure, even a simple children’s game.
