Читать книгу The Handbook of Solitude - Группа авторов - Страница 66

The wooden reel or fort‐da game, which is the famous developmental observation made by Freud (1920/1955a) on his 18‐month‐old grandson, clearly demonstrates the child’s ability to deal with solitude caused by the inevitable brief separation from his mother. In the game, the child repeatedly held the reel by the string that was tied around it and threw it in such a way that it disappeared into his cot; then, he pulled the reel again until it reappeared. This act was accompanied by the utterance o‐o‐o‐o (from the German word fort, which means gone) upon disappearance, and da (which means there) upon reappearance. The same child also used to look at a mirror, then fall on the floor and utter the words Baby o‐o‐o‐o, which means that he could make his image gone. In an earlier version of this game, he had the habit of throwing several small objects away, a game accompanied again by o‐o‐o‐o (here only disappearance was enacted).

Freud’s (1920/1955a) interpretation of the game was that the child, “during this long period of solitude” (p. 15), was able to renunciate the instinctual satisfaction caused by the mother’s presence, an ability that constitutes a major cultural achievement for the human being. In addition, by constructively repeating and working through disappearance and reappearance, the child transformed his passive experience of separation and solitude into an active one; he became master of the situation through binding. Thus, the distressing experience of separation from the mother can be a great source of gratification and pleasure if it is expressed in the symbolic level (i.e., words, playing), already from the second year of life. Indeed, Freud (1920/1955a) notices that this game may have been beneficial for the little boy, “a successful piece of self‐discipline,” as he wrote in an earlier study (Freud, 1900/1953), because when his mother died, about four years later, the boy did not show signs of grief. It seems that the game had prepared him for this irreparable loss.