Category Archives: JM13D

Freud presents his essay as a critique of the assumption that as humans we are drawn innately to gaining as much happiness and pleasure as we can. Freud disagrees with this assumption. He argues that we all have a mental perception of displeasure or pain. Our minds or perception is more drawn to dealing with the pains we experiences and this helps us to gain pleasure or happiness as a byproduct. Freud was writing after the time of WWI. At the time that event was the most displeasurable things humans had experienced.

 Gaining pleasure is not our dominant trait but most of the processes of our mind do end up in pleasure. He explains this concept with his investigation of “Fort Da” or “Child’s Play.” Freud experienced and analyzed the actions of a little boy who was constantly throwing away his toys in a bid to say Fort Da or gone away. The boy was not throwing away his toys and picking it back again because he found pleasure in that experience but instead, he was dealing with the painful things in his life that is his mother who was constantly away and his father who was off to war. Dealing with the pain was what brought the young kid happiness or pleasure. So the boy’s happiness had to deal with his own perception of what happiness was.

    In the same way, Plato’s Allegory of the cave is very similar to Fort Da. In the Allegory, Plato compares men in a state of ignorance to prisoners in a cave unable to turn their heads. Directly behind the prisoners, fire burns.  Between the fire and the prisoners, puppeteers who are behind the prisoners, hold up puppets that cast shadows on the wall of the cave. The prisoners cannot see the real objects but all they see are shadows. In the minds of the prisoners, the shadows are real objects but when released they see that their perception of reality was different. Plato’s allegory also shows that what is considered as happiness is different for different people in different situations. Pain can be seen as pleasure or happiness by another person.

   I totally agree with the views of Freud and Plato. A person’s definition of pleasure or happiness is all perceptive. What is good for the goose is not always good for the gander so to speak. For example, a religious martyr who goes through torture and death because of his/ her beliefs will be viewed by another person as experiencing displeasure and in no way happy. However, even through that pain, the martyr might be happy inside knowing and believing that he is doing God’s will. Still a question remains, which kind of happiness is superior, gaining happiness by dealing with pain or gaining happiness through pleasurable things?

In Chapter 2 of Freud’s text, he carefully investigates “children’s play,” specifically a game of “disappearance and return” which becomes known as “fort da.” Why do you think this game is so important to Freud’s ideas? How does this compare to Plato’s “allegory of the cave”? And, of course, what does any of this tell us about happiness?

The game known as fort da is so so important to Freud because he is attempting to understand our unconscious mind and find the hidden reasons for why we do the things we do. When the child plays with his toy and throws it away just to find it again, Freud saw this as a link to his mother. When she left, the child would be sad and upon her return would once more be happy. He would experience the same thing while playing with his toy except now he was the one in control. In this way, the child makes himself experience the same kind of pain that he goes through when his mother leaves and every time he finds the toy, he receives immense pleasure. This is similar to Plato’s “allegory of the cave” in that both the child and the men in the cave received knowledge of the world around them and understood it better in order to achieve happiness. The child knew his mother would return just as his toy did and the men in the cave went outside and saw the real world to become happy. It also shows how once you acquire knowledge, you cannot go back to being ignorant. As the internet says “cannot unsee”.

This tells me that as far as happiness is concerned, it is easier to achieve it when you have a good perception of the world and see things as they really are. More knowledge does not make you happier but being comfortable with the way things are in your life is sure to bring more pleasure every day.  The child understand that his mother will come back and even though he still feels pain when she leaves, it is lessened.  However, the pleasure he feels upon her return is increased. The man in the cave has been chained up and sees mere shadows of what the world really is so once he experiences what it is like outside, he becomes much happier because his eyes are open to the truth.

I just realized why my comment wasn’t going where it was supposed to. It’s been a while since I blogged lol sorry.  -Marianna

Both Daniel Gilbert and Sigmund Freud study psychology. Freud came first, of course, and his theories are taught in introductory psychology classes everywhere. So there’s no doubt that Gilbert learned about Freud’s theories and studied them in great detail when he was a psychology student. On pages 36 and 37 of Gilbert’s book, he even takes a quote directly from Freud.

One idea that the two psychologists seem to have in common is the one that Freud describes as the reality-principle. On page 5 of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud says: “Under the influence of the instinct of the ego for self-preservation it is replaced by the ‘reality-principle’, which without giving up the intention of ultimately attaining pleasure yet demands and enforces the postponement of satisfaction, the renunciation of manifold possibilities of it, and the temporary endurance of ‘pain’ on the long and circuitous road to pleasure.” To put this in the plain English, Freud is basically describing the delaying of gratification. We sometimes do things that we don’t like to do, such as going to school or work, in order to attain pleasure later on, such as money to spend on our hobbies and other things that make us happy.

It is possible that Gilbert built on this “reality-principle” idea that Freud spoke about. On page 36, Gilbert says: “People want to be happy, and all the other things they want are typically meant to be means to that end. Even when people forgo happiness in the moment—by dieting when they could be eating, or working late when they could be sleeping—they are usually doing so in order to increase its future yield.” So the idea is the same. We do things that we might not want to do, because we believe that the results of our hard work will make us happy in the long run.

Besides this very striking resemblance that Gilbert’s writing has to Freud’s, I think the two pieces of writing are distinct. Gilbert writes specifically about happiness. He believes that emotional happiness, for example, is “the feeling common to the feelings we have when we see our new granddaughter smile for the first time, receive word of a promotion, help a wayward tourist find the art museum, taste Belgian chocolate toward the back of our tongue, inhale the scent of our lover’s shampoo, hear that song we used to like so much in high school but haven’t heard in years, touch our cheek to kitten fur, cure cancer, or get a really good snootful of cocaine.” Freud, on the other hand, would probably say that we are only fueled by our id’s desires and impulses for sex and/or aggression. But he doesn’t talk about happiness at all when describing the pleasure-principle. After all, you may be feeling pleasure, but that doesn’t mean you’re necessarily happy.