Fort-da game

In the end, the answer is not of any great consequence, for the real problem is the contradiction , which here is seen to arise very early, between the compulsion to repeat and the pleasure principle. How is it that satisfaction is to be derived from repeating actions that have been sources of unpleasurable feelings? The great interest of this discussion of Freud's is that it sums up and condenses his subsequent exploration of the issue of the repetition compulsion. This very early children's game shows this compulsion to be one of the fundamental processes of the psyche , with two enigmatic aspects, one making manifest "mysterious masochistic trends" that resist all attempts at analysis p.

Thus Melanie Klein and Donald Winnicott both drew a number of lessons from it as they sought to cast light on the origins of the child's mental life and develop play techniques for use in child therapy. For Jacques Lacan , the game expressed the child's accession to the symbolic order , and the purpose of making something appear and disappear was to replace it with elementary signifiers.

Jean Laplanche , for his part, sees this play as the first attempt to respond to the adult 's enigmatic messages. It must be noted that Freud's original discussion actually focused in turn on first one and then another game, each dominant at a different moment. The first, at eighteen months, is based on fort , on throwing the object far away, with the accompanying "o" sound, and it indicates the pleasure obtained from making the other disappear, or making oneself disappear, a pleasure that makes it possible to tolerate absence and reflects the violence that absence implies; this game endures, for it is still available when, at thirty months, Ernst is gratified by his father's going off to war.

The second game is founded on disappearance and reappearance, and shows a quite different kind of pleasure, that felt by the child when he sees what he had thought gone forever return from the void , and thus discovers the possibility of permanence, of continuity—the necessary basis for introjection and the working out not only of the symbolic order but also of the imaginary one.

As much as the first game, if it is associated with nothing else, is governed by death -dealing repetition, the second, by contrast, is connected to a constructive repetition and partakes of a process of binding and transformation. Password Please enter your Password. Forgot password? Don't have an account? Sign in via your Institution. You could not be signed in, please check and try again. Sign in with your library card Please enter your library card number.

Related Content Related Overviews compulsion to repeat. Freud answers that the pleasure in the repetition of an awful experience is the pleasure of mastery. In repeating the traumatic experience, the sufferer tries to master it. But what could mastery mean? It means that this time the sufferer will be prepared for the traumatic assault.

Trauma, says Freud, is the result of fright, an emotion that he distinguishes from fear and dread, both of which anticipate the danger. Fright is the sudden experience of an unanticipated danger. Reading Beyond the Pleasure Principle, it at first seems that Freud grants that the compulsion to repeat is even more primal than the pleasure principle. And while this may be his final conclusion, he does not give up on the pleasure principle so easily.

Observant as usual, Freud noticed that the nephew would play an odd game when he was alone. The fort-da game it is called. In this way, the repetition of an unpleasurable experience was actually an attempt at its mastery, and in this sense a search for pleasure.

He generally threw the spool, or other objects, away, and did not try to retrieve them. It represents me and not me, mother and not mother, at the same time. The most important thing is not to ask which is which, for the whole point of the transitional object is that it both connects and separates, allowing the young child to hold onto his or her parent while letting the parent go at the same time, using the blankie or teddy to represent both connection and separation.

Freud, as we have seen, sees psychic trauma as the result not of fear, but of fright, the sudden intrusion of an alien experience that was unexpected and unprepared for. The trauma lies more in the unexpectedness than the intrusion itself. The repetition that characterizes traumatic experience is an attempt to remember what was never originally experienced in the first place, for it happened before I was there, prepared to experience it. This is what Cathy Caruth, and those who follow her line of thinking, such as Dori Laub and Shoshana Felman, mean when they say that trauma is an event without a witness.

Trauma is the absence of presence. What if we think about the absence of presence along the lines of Winnicott? For Winnicott , trauma is the disruption of the experience of going-on-being. Unlike resetting a stopped watch, the gap in going-on-being can never be recovered; it is as though a piece of oneself will always be missing. It is these missing moments, experienced as pieces of the self that are not held together in time, that is trauma.

In trauma it is the self that has gone missing.