The game “fort da” is important to Freud’s studies because it shows that an eighteen year old baby who was in pain was trying to seek pleasure. People cope with unhappy experiences by finding some way to gratify an impulse. The child didn’t act out when his mom was gone, but that didn’t mean that he wasn’t upset about it. The child invented a game of disappearance and return. He threw away a toy under the bed and would emit a loud ‘o-o-o-o’ and then joyfully say ‘Da’ when he retrieves the toy again. Even though repeating this unhappy experience over and over again was painful, it was rewarding at the end when joy returned. Freud also thinks that maybe throwing the object away is a way to gratify an impulse of revenge suppressed in real life, directed against his mother for leaving.
The child is like the men in the cave, they don’t understand things to be the truth and once they gain intelligence there’s no way of going back. When one man leaves the cave and finds out the real truth, he can’t go back to his original thinking of the shadows he saw. The people in the cave don’t believe him because it is so foreign from what they perceived of something. For the baby, he didn’t know what life was like for his family. He accepted that his mom was going to leave and didn’t act out, so he kept himself busy. But when the child was five and three-quarter years old, he acted out how he normally would when his mother left. He showed no grief when his mother died.
All of this tells us that happiness comes and goes. There is no happiness if there is no pain.
