Category Archives: ResponsePaper

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.

In chapter two of Sigmund Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle he introduces a very interesting topic in which is called “Fort da”. “Fort da” is interesting because it came to be from what he observed from an eighteen month child. Freud describes the child as an obedient, calm and not an intellectual child but the ‘game’ that Freud observes the child playing says otherwise. The game is that the child has a tendency to throw his toys in the corner so that they disappear, but then he pulls the toy back out to make it reappear. Freud says that the child is doing so to relieve the pain he gets when the mother leaves the child.

I agree with this point that Freud makes. Even though the child may not seem to be missing his mother, psychologically he is because of the way he plays the game. The aggressive nature of throwing an object shows that the child is displeased with something in his life (like his mother leaving) and he wants to express that emotion. Even though he throws it in the meaning that he wants the toy to go away (fort), he always pulls the object back and says “da” (there) as if he’s happy to see it again. This brings it back to the point with his mother, when his mother leaves the child accepts the fact that she is leaving but it upsets him so he takes his anger out of something else. He already knows that his mother will return just like his toy and when it does he says “da” which shows a sense of happiness from the child. It is a sense of happiness because the child has found his toy again and to him the object did not completely disappear just like how his mother will come back after leaving for a time and that time he will be happy.

I noticed is that when the child throws away its toy it seems like the child does not forget the image of object is because when he pulls it out again he remembers it and says “da” like “there you are” but the child does not know if the toy is truly there without seeing it again.

This relates the Plato’s allegory of the cave in a way that the prisoners in the cave can just see the shadows but they do not know what they are nor can they tell each other anything about them but the shadow. Just like how the child can see his mother and toy leave him but cannot explain where they went and what they are doing. Both the prisoners and the child cannot achieve true intellect in the eyes of Plato because for the child he only believes in the physical appearance of something to know that it is truly there. As for the prisoners they know an object is there but they do not know what it is, to Plato just knowing that something is physically there does not give one true knowledge of the object.

Malisa Basic- Response Paper #2 (Option #3)

Rather than the two given options where I had a choice to write about what Gilbert may have learned through Plato’s philosophy or discuss in detail and explain child’s play, I took a different approach and decided to analyze the two different texts, comparing and contrasting the views of Freud and Plato, and the way they decided to approach their won ideas in text.  The ideas Plato portrays in the Allegory of the Cave is set up differently than Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle.  Plato states his ideas in a story format, contrasting to Freud’s piece where he talks directly to the reader being the audience about his views and opinions.  Even though it would make more sense  understanding a certain concept through a moral or story, I found it more difficult to read than Freud’s work.  This may have resulted to the time period each article was written.  However, in this case, it seemed as if a more direct and simple approach was easier for me to understand in which ideas the author was trying to express through his work.

In the Allegory of the Cave,  prisoners are locked in within a cave where they are only given sight to shadows of objects by carriers of the objects who show the object through fire.  They know nothing of the outside world, or exposure of anything else aside from what they are shown.  However, once prisoners are taken out of the cave and are exposed to reality and the world outside , they find themselves having a difficult time returning to the cave.  Though this may seem like a simple concept, the way Plato has worded this story is quite confusing.  However, I find the main idea of this story to be up to one’s own interpretation.  The way I interpreted this story was that once individuals are exposed to the truth, they cannot trust what information is given to them.  They rather learn about certain objects through their own experience.

In Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle, he states that ”Most of the ‘pain’ we experience is of a perceptual order, perception either of the urge of unsatisfied instincts or of something in the external world which may be painful in itself.” (pg. 6)  Here he states that most pain is a cause of a mental process, a deficiency in pleasure.  This can be expressed in Plato’s book because the prisoners don’t feel pain until they leave their cave.  Exposure to the unknown brings pain, as does ”something in the external world which may be painful itself” as Freud explained, even though this may seem like positive progress towards improvement for the lives of these prisoners.  When people are exposed to reality something that was not shown to them before, it may cause confusion and denial because it is hard to believe this new truth exposed to them, and hard to understand how what they knew before and thought was true, really wasn’t.  A feeling of denial as well as deceit can eventually cause pain as the prisoners did.  What other factors cause pain?  Can pain eventually become an indifferent feeling?  Is there a term for this feeling?  How would Plato or Freud describe this?

“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.