Category Archives: DG13E

Isaac Douek

Professor Erica Kaufman

English 2150

15 March 2011

“The Most Atypical Typical Situation”

Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants,” while sophisticated, presents itself as applicable to many issues a couple may have.

The woman, Jig, seems ridiculously indecisive and reluctant to commit to something that is clearly for the benefit of the couple. This reluctance, however, has been planted by the man’s nonchalant approach to a big decision in their lives, indicating he may not care as much as should.

As tradition has it, the woman makes a remark to coax the man into showing her some sort of affection. “I don’t care about me.” She specifically states something selfless to guilt the man. As any smart man would, he bites. He takes the bait. He is forced into showing something he takes for granted as obvious, that he actually does care for her. Once he has succumbed to her plea for attention, they happily move on to, I think, elope and take the train they’ve been waiting for as far as they can.

Section II of Sigmund Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle examines the activities of a child; specifically a game of disappearance and return that revolves around the use of the words, “fort” and “da”. Although simplistic in nature, the activities of the child indicate a very analytical, physiological aspect of the “pleasure principle”. The child would throw toys away from his crib while attempting to say fort (gone) and da (there). The child would throw away the toy in hopes that his mother would retrieve it and come back to him. A brief analysis indicates that the actions of the child give away his motive for power, indicating that he gains pleasure in securing domination over his mother’s actions.
In some respects, the Freud’s analysis of the child’s actions has similarities with Plato’s Allegory of a Cave. Both works revolve around an unenlightened individual, the child and a chained man respectively. Both works attempt to speculate the comparisons between the person’s actions and his physiological motives. In both cases, both the child and the chained man may have acted according to their physiological motives, but may not have fully understood them. This brings into mind, Plato’s four stages of knowledge analogy: imagination, belief, thought, and ultimately understanding. Although Freud did not conjure up the child’s actions in his imagination, his belief that the child was acting on the power principle brought him to a breakthrough in thought. Since Freud cannot directly see into the child ‘sub-consciousness, he cannot fully understand the child’s physiological motive, however his analysis based on the four stages of knowledge indicated he tried to.
In the first section of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud speculates the prevalence of the pleasure principle: all individuals have an instinctive drive to experience satisfaction and to avoid pain. However, one may first experience pain of one endeavor to ultimately experience the satisfaction associated with such an endeavor. The example of the child provided in section II is a clear example: The child uses his measly effort to throw the toy away from his crib in hopes of his mother coming back to retrieve it. Although the child would be deprived of the toy due to his actions of throwing it away, he probably reconciles that his mother will come back to retrieve it. His mother’s presence afterwards would be the pleasure. Section II also introduces the concept of the “power principle” that speculates individuals can attain satisfaction from securing domination over the actions and beliefs of others.

Aferdita Bogdanovic
In Chapter 2 of “Beyond the Pleasure Principle”, Freud expresses the theory through an 18-month-old child and his actions. The game was known as “fort-da”, also known as the game of “disappearance and return”. The child repeatedly throws a wooden reel tied with a string around it over his crib. Freud related this game to that of his mother leaving and returning whenever he would throw the toy unattached. This is the pleasure and pain theory. When the 18-month-old child would throw the toy over the crib, it resembles his mom leaving which is a painful experience. However, when the child would retrieve his toy, it showed that his mom returned which was a pleasurable experience. By the toy having a string attached to it, it shows Freud’s pleasure and pain theory. This game relates to the ideas of Freud because it shows that people seek pleasure and avoid pain. In doing this they take control of the situation.
Freud’s Pleasure and Pain theory is comparable to Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” because they both have to face reality in one-way or another. The 18 month old, realizes that his mother is not always going to be around for him to experience pleasure. He also realized that with pleasure comes pain. The men in the cave realized that their imagination of life outside the cave wasn’t what they expected. He experienced life outside of what he was used to. The man who went outside the cave was upset because his expectations werent met, but at the same time experienced pleasure because he was seeing life outside of what he was used to.

In Chapter 2 of Freud’s text he describes his observation of an 18-month-old child playing a game Freud named “fort da”. In this game the child would throw one of his toys, only to find it again. Freud also observed that when the child’s mother would leave the child would basically become upset and start acting up. Freud associated this game that the child would play with the departure of his mother, basically stating that this game was a substitute for what the child would experience, but instead this time the child could control when the toy would “go away” and “come back”, and this association made perfect sense to me.

Everyone wants to feel as if they are in control of their lives, and this plays a key role in our happiness. The child was obviously not happy when his mother would leave but found pleasure in this game. Freud was initially confused, being that he didn’t understand why the child would put himself through the pain of throwing the toy away to begin with. But at times we need to feel pain in order to gain pleasure and be in a state of “happiness”. In my 18 years of life I have heard countless people say that they didn’t know what they had until they lost it, and i just saw it as them finally learning to appreciate it. This is exactly what happened with this child. He would gain pleasure from getting back his lost toy.

And when it comes to the whole “control” aspect of the game (how the child was in control of when the toy would leave and when it would come back, as stated earlier, everyone wants to be in control of things in their lives. I have found that the situations that take away from my happiness the most are those that i can not control. A prime example for this is death. When i was 9 years old and my grandmother died, i was devastated about her being gone, but in a sense i didn’t think it was fair. When one thinks something isn’t fair, they would obviously go about the situation differently, and therefore they would be in control. I’m basically saying that it makes people happy when they are in control of their lives and they get what they want.

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.