Freud’s theory of the child’s game of “disappearance and return”, also known as “fort da”, is similar to Freud’s theory of pleasure and pain. The game is played with a wooden reel with a piece of string attached to it in which the child would throw away and reel it back in. The game is basically a replay of the child’s experience when his mother goes away and returns to him. During the period in which the mother is away from the child, the child is in an unpleasant state of tension. He is in pain being away from his mother even though he never cried. When the mother returns to his side, the child is relaxed from this tension and pain therefore feeling pleasure. When the child retrieves the wooden reel with the piece of string, he is reminiscing the pleasure he gets when his mother returns by his side. However, in order to obtain this pleasure, he has to go through a painful process of throwing the wooden reel away, which is when his mother leaves him. Also, by playing this game, the child is trying to reduce the pain he feels when his mother leaves him. In the game, he is in control of the toy and he can either throw it away or take it back.
Plato’s Allegory of the Cave is slightly similar to the child’s game “fort da”. In the Allegory of the cave, the prisoners are in an unpleasant state in which the only things that they see are shadows. When they are taken out of the cave, they are pleased to see the reality of things and what the shadows really are. After experiencing what the real world is like outside the cave, they return back to the cave and try to reproduce the same experience by teaching the other prisoners about what they saw. By trying to teach the other prisoners about the outside world, the prisoner is sharing his pleasure to the outside world. The prisoner can only appreciate the real world after staying in the cave for a very long time. When the prisoner is trapped inside the cave, it is similar to when the child is in pain away from the mother. When the child is reunited with the mother he is happy just like when the prisoner is finally released from the cave and enters the outside world.
I think that both the child’s game of “fort da” and Plato’s Allegory of the Cave can be related to happiness. The pleasure the child feels when he is reunited with his mother and the toy is a sense of happiness. By throwing the toy away and retrieving it, he is trying to remember those feelings. When the prisoner is forced outside the cave and brought to the outside world, he has, in a sense, gained happiness because he is able to determine what the true form of the shadows are. To the child, happiness is being reunited with his mother and to the prisoner, happiness is experiencing and knowing the true forms of things. The child is recreating the happiness he felt when his mother return by playing this game. The prisoners is recreating the happiness and pleasure of the outside world by teaching the others about it.
