In chapter two of Sigmund Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle he introduces a very interesting topic in which is called “Fort da”. “Fort da” is interesting because it came to be from what he observed from an eighteen month child. Freud describes the child as an obedient, calm and not an intellectual child but the ‘game’ that Freud observes the child playing says otherwise. The game is that the child has a tendency to throw his toys in the corner so that they disappear, but then he pulls the toy back out to make it reappear. Freud says that the child is doing so to relieve the pain he gets when the mother leaves the child.
I agree with this point that Freud makes. Even though the child may not seem to be missing his mother, psychologically he is because of the way he plays the game. The aggressive nature of throwing an object shows that the child is displeased with something in his life (like his mother leaving) and he wants to express that emotion. Even though he throws it in the meaning that he wants the toy to go away (fort), he always pulls the object back and says “da” (there) as if he’s happy to see it again. This brings it back to the point with his mother, when his mother leaves the child accepts the fact that she is leaving but it upsets him so he takes his anger out of something else. He already knows that his mother will return just like his toy and when it does he says “da” which shows a sense of happiness from the child. It is a sense of happiness because the child has found his toy again and to him the object did not completely disappear just like how his mother will come back after leaving for a time and that time he will be happy.
I noticed is that when the child throws away its toy it seems like the child does not forget the image of object is because when he pulls it out again he remembers it and says “da” like “there you are” but the child does not know if the toy is truly there without seeing it again.
This relates the Plato’s allegory of the cave in a way that the prisoners in the cave can just see the shadows but they do not know what they are nor can they tell each other anything about them but the shadow. Just like how the child can see his mother and toy leave him but cannot explain where they went and what they are doing. Both the prisoners and the child cannot achieve true intellect in the eyes of Plato because for the child he only believes in the physical appearance of something to know that it is truly there. As for the prisoners they know an object is there but they do not know what it is, to Plato just knowing that something is physically there does not give one true knowledge of the object.
