Reading the Repetitive Unity of Fort-Da: A Freudian Exercise

The earliest preoccupation of a child and, as it seems, his inevitable and ultimate preoccupation is to seek pleasure. Governed by this hedonist principle, the child indulges in the joys of repetitive play. Drawing upon Sigmund Freud’s insights, we may call play ‘the royal road to understanding the infantile ego’s efforts at synthesis.’^[1] In what follows, I seek to read one of Freud’s observations of childhood behaviour as a prism to comprehend the dynamics of play and repetition.

Not child’s play

It was one fine summer day in Vienna in 1920 when Freud thought it expedient ‘to leave the dark and dismal subject of traumatic neurosis and pass on to examine the method of working employed by the mental apparatus in one of its earliest normal activities – in children’s play.’^[2] The ‘normal activities’ were those of an otherwise obedient little boy of eighteen months involved in a solitary repetitive play. This child,^[3] Freud noted, engaged himself in throwing small objects away from him in a corner under the bed and then taking delight in its eventual rediscovery. The main theme of this dramatization in the play sphere was to enact a separation from the object in a loud, long drawn-out ‘O-o-o-o’ that represented the German word ‘fort’ (‘gone’) and hailing its reappearance with a joyful ‘da’ (‘there’). The play corresponded to a real-life experience of the boy. It was related to his mother’s occasional excursions from the household without him. Incidentally, the play caused the child one of his very first ruptures because it must have been utterly disagreeable to him to ‘let go’ of his mother. Let us, for our purposes, examine the sequences of this play act.

1. In the first item of the sequence, the child who is being left throws the object away. Freud reads a possible explanation of revenge in this – ‘If you don’t want to stay with me, I don’t want you’ – thus aiming to gain active mastery by an apparent growth of emotional autonomy.

2. In the second play act, the child makes himself throw the object away. A short time later, Freud observed the boy playing with a reel that had a piece of string tied around it. He would toss the reel away from him to where it could no longer be seen, before pulling it back into view and hailing its reappearance with a gleeful ‘Da!’ (‘There!’). The string is where the child locates his agency as he gains imaginary de facto control over the situation. The functional imperative behind this, unlike the former instance, is not to dispose of the object but to gain control over the traumatic situation by holding the power to orchestrate its return.^[4]

3. In the third play act, the little boy makes himself ‘gone’. Freud noticed the boy utter his ‘O-o-o-o’ sound with reference to himself notably while crouching down below a mirror, thus making his image gone^[5]. He is now both the person who is being left and the person who leaves. He has become the master by incorporating not solely the person who, in life, is beyond his control, i.e., his mother but also his own self.

4. The fourth part of the sequence is separated by 12 months. The boy, all of two and a half years, throws away the object, no longer wishing for its return. This is when the boy sends away the father ‘to the fwont’ so that he may no longer be disturbed in his exclusive possession over the mother. In a footnote added to The Interpretation of Dreams in 1919, on the first dream of his grandson Ernst, Freud notes the child sobbing violently, crying, ‘Daddy! Daddy! Baby!’ In Freud’s reading, Daddy and the baby remain together, but Ernst’s tears speak of the approaching farewell.^[6] But this act also signifies that the child was able to conceive of absence in an abstract sense, foresee it, and fear it pre-emptively. A year later, Freud wrote about this very little boy playing fort with his father; this time, he refrained from performing the da part of the game. In rejecting the possibility of its (the father as the object) reappearance, the repetitive unity of the fort-da play is interrupted. Life disappears there (it is fort) in not being da (there).

Going Fort with Repetitive Élan

In the fort-da play, the search operation is run and re-run repetitively based on the conviction that the lost object will be reliably found and re-found (except in the final act of the play sequence). This confidence is premised on the child’s dawning awareness that he can wish to have one (here, the mother) in mind even when she is absent. Freud, however, stresses that the fort part of the game was much of the time sufficient unto itself and was ‘repeated untiringly’ by the child. The repetition of the undesirable part of the game (exhibited in the fort part) may at times suitably swap its position with its da counterpart. For instance, Freud mentions a child’s frightening experience with a doctor who performed a small operation on him. He continues, ‘After the doctor has gone, he will play at being the doctor himself and will repeat the assault upon some small brother or sister who is helpless in his hands.’^[7] Freud reads a swing over from passivity to activity in frightening experiences, becoming the subject of the next game. In this very act, there is a hint of a role reversal of the child – who was once the sufferer but now turns into the aggressor.

This is as far as Freud goes with his interpretation. But we may highlight the fact that with the doctor gone (fort), the child recreates the fort part of the play (by becoming a doctor), repeating the unpleasurable acts on his siblings. The fort part of the play alone could have become the beginning of an increasing tendency on the child’s part to compulsively repeat that which refers to ‘the beyond’ of the pleasure principle: the drive to overrule pleasure by the instinct of self-annihilation. In this very act, there is a clear hint of a role reversal of the child – who was once the sufferer but now turns into the aggressor. This might tempt one to see in the child a sadist in the making or, to put it otherwise, a sadist with a difference, for the child derives pleasure in inflicting those unpleasures on his siblings that he himself previously underwent. In these situations, the child doubles as both the passive sufferer and the aggressor. Apparently, there is a vacillation in his subject position: the meanings these oscillations possibly carry constitute our next enquiry.

Reading through Freudian Repetition

To re-route, Freud discovered and located the meaning of the puzzling activity^[8] that his grandson constantly repeated in his attempts to master an unpleasant situation by taking an active part in it. But in actively objectifying his own self-presence (by reproducing himself in the reel and in the immaterial thing caught in the mirror’s reflection), the child constantly negotiates his representation as an absent other. For that matter, the reel is an apparitional device to make oneself go ‘fort’; the reflection in the mirror is an optical ghost demonstrating over and again the copresence of an absent other. These ‘going aways’ are intoxicating to the child, as they work on him like some ancient mariner’s spell. As Jacques Lacan transposing absence in the parlance of the language observed, ‘through the word – already a presence made of absence – absence itself gives a name in that moment of origin whose perpetual recreation Freud detected in the play of the child.’^[9] By requiring such a ghostly representation, the child’s game irreparably compromises the authority of the present self. In staging this game of disappearance and return and in replaying it, the play also dramatizes our function as spectators. The text of the play constitutes the child as an object, and in doing so, it identifies his place in the spectacle. The child watches himself either as a spectacled self (with the mirror serving as the specs of negotiating his presence) or as a spectacular other (with the apparitional reel watching over, as it were, the act of self-distancing, which the child recreates in the play).

The text also evokes the spectator as an observing subject, a role that the play explicitly invites us to see as ‘other’ once it asks us to see the replay. The repetition of the play act complicates the asubjectivity – i.e., the impersonality of the total presence of the spectator implicitly endorsed by his apparent location outside the field of play.^[10] This is because everyone who plays at or works on gathering the pieces has a piece of the game.^[11] Thus, the game means playing usefully with oneself as with one’s own object … This is the ‘complete game’ of fort-da.

As Jacques Derrida comments, ‘With(out) the object of his text, Freud does exactly what Ernst does with(out) his bobine … Let’s grant that Freud writes. He writes what he writes; he describes what he describes, i.e., what Ernst does: he goes fort:da with his bobine.’^[12] Repetition, in language is stasis; it is boredom and is akin to death. Yet, literature is replete with examples of repetitive textual traits, since without these iterations, the critic in the reader would be at a loss of any epistemological grounding. In certain ways then, repetitions in language have an enduring quality. Like the returning reel, like a reflection in the mirror, and like language itself, repetition compels us to play ourselves as the ‘other’. The indestructibility of this repetition is inaugurated by this primordial symbolisation made manifest in the play Fort! Da! It is precisely in his solitude that the desire of the little child has already become the desire of another, of an alter ego who dominates him and whose object of desire is, henceforth, his own affliction. The child now addresses himself to an imaginary or real partner; his action causes the object (his own self or an anticipated one) to appear or disappear, and this provocation of absence and presence becomes embodied in the symbolic dyad of two elementary exclamations: fort and da!

The Repetitive Everyday

Play, like everyday life, is all about recurrences. ‘Everyday life is made of recurrences; gestures of labour and leisure, mechanical movements both human and properly mechanic, hours, days, weeks, months, years, linear and cyclical repetitions, natural and rational time, etc.’^[13] And so are games. We play games as part of our everyday living, re-doing every time a part of our own selves in the process. Further, as young children, we rehearse those processes such as when children learn to gain control of a situation when their mothers are away. Are we not reminded of the very uniqueness of the fort-da play, the play that was ‘repeated untiringly’ by the ‘little boy’?

For Freud, Ernst’s play was a ‘puzzling activity’, a riddle that had to be decoded. The child was the keeper of secrets. The key to unlocking the cryptic messages lay in the child’s repetitive play. If repetition is the common denominator in the fort-da play, the small child – in throwing away the real mother and pulling back the reel mother – is fully conscious of acting, just for fun. He certainly believes in the content of his symbolism.^[14] In his act of playing with such a ludic^[15] symbol, we can locate the child’s refusal to allow the world of adults or ordinary reality to interfere with play so as to enjoy a private reality of his own. The child makes no effort to persuade the adults of symbolic play, of consciousness, of the make-believe involved in such play. This constitutes the ludic potential of the play, as it is weighed down by the ‘plus value’ of seriousness. Play is, then, depreciated, losing some of its own worth. Such reasoning allows us to see that the repetitive play of fort-da is inherently serious. In as much as play functions as a microcosm of everyday life, repetitions are meaningful for where they play out.