“fort da.” as Freud refers to the game that a 18 month old child created, seems to be merely an “allegorical game” used to delineate the childs mother as a symbolic object. The child was representing a relationship with his mother, while finding a way to deal with the grief he experienced when the mother left. Just as Plato’s allegory of the cave where the prisoners in the cave perceive reality based on the shadows that the fire creates, essentially the imperfect “reflections” of the ultimate forms, the game of “fort da.” is used as an allegorical representation of ” imperfect reflections” of the reality the baby was exposed to. The eight month old baby obviously misses his mother, which subsequently represent truth and reality, however, he is dealing with this trauma by playing with a reel that had a piece of string tied around it, tossing the reel away from himself, and pulling it back into view. Essentially, the baby is attaining happiness derived from repeating actions that have been sources of unpleasurable feelings. In Plato’s Allegory of the cave, the majority of the prisoners essentially rejected the truth (the unpleaurable feeling), and decided to live in a world of shadows and false images (the happy feeling), just as the baby decided; a world that was safe from them, safely locked away in there minds. Interestingly, Freud blames the psychological mechanism of “repression” on doing this, because reality is very hard to bear sometimes. I agree with this because from my experience people sometimes tend to live in a false reality (eg. drug addicts, wives who stay with abusive husbands) because the reality of the situation is in fact, almost unbearable, just like Freud’s little 18 month old subject.
“fort da.” is important to Freud’s ideas because this games supports Freud’s “Power instinct” theory where humans have an impulse to “Master a situation and avoid pain. According to Freud, it seems as though happiness is when someone avoids pain; whatever else the feeling may be, the most important thing is to avoid that which causes you some kind of neurotic trauma, essentially pain. After, thinking about this for some time, I realized that there are a very few amount of feelings that attribute to happiness, in essence, many feelings bring pain and very little bring happiness. For example, if you trip on the floor while walking outside, that is a “Gross mechanical force”, something attributing to pain, which means you are no longer happy. According to Freud, if something like an outside force can alter a person’s “state of happiness”, Will we ever be happy? I even started to think that Freud himself might not have been much of a happy guy, if he truly believed that all these things makes someone “un-happy”, for example I can picture something like this going on.
Freud- “Ahh Crap! I hit my leg on my bed head, now I am unhappy, F life.
