Kristie Ching – Response Paper 2 (Option 2)
Psychologists and philosophers use different perspectives and methods to study happiness; even so, Freud and Plato both found a way to use comparable metaphors to explain happiness. Freud, the psychologist, uses “fort da,” which is a child’s game of “disappearance and return,” to represent happiness by showing the relationship between pain and pleasure. In Book VII of the Republic, the respected philosopher Plato uses his story of the “Allegory of the Cave” to show us that we need to step out of the cave and experience new things in order to achieve happiness.
In Chapter 2 of Freud’s Pleasure Principal, he describes and examines a child’s game of disappearance and return. In this game, a little boy throws his toy somewhere where it cannot be seen and then he reeled it back. When he throws the toy away he is experiencing pain, subsequently when he reels the toy back to him, he is experiencing pleasure. Freud explains that the boy uses this concept of the disappearance and reappearance of the toy to explain how the little boy calmly handles the departure and return of his mother, whom he is extremely attached to. He uses this to reassure himself that his mom will return every time she leaves. Basically, Freud uses the “fort da” concept to describe how pain, which in this case is disappearance, will ultimately results in pleasure, which is the reappearance or return.
Plato also uses symbolism and metaphors in his “Allegory of the cave” to show how people need to experience pain before they can experience pleasure, which in turn leads to happiness. In this allegory, prisoners who are only exposed to the illustration of shadows and fire do not know what it is like to experience anything other they what they already see or know. Consequently, when they are introduced to new objects they are able to experience things in the real world and make sense of them, which is pleasurable. Both creators of the “fort da” game and the “allegory of the cave” use symbolism to show how pain leads to pleasure. The little boy knows that in order to feel pleasure in the reappearance of his mother, his mother must first leave; similarly, the prisoner’s of the cave need to leave the cave to experience things outside of the fire, shadows and the cave.
