for what we now know as post-traumatic stress disorder and beyond the pleasure principle
shock. I encourage you
And I want to draw your attention to a couple of passages on page 144 on the screen,
Gives me fright, fear, apprehension are incorrectly used as
clear distinction. Apprehension, angst denotes
a certain condition as of expectation of danger and preparation for it,
requires a definite object of which one is afraid fright strike
is the name of the condition to which one is reduced if one encounters a danger without being prepared
for it. It lays stress on the element of surprise. No.
The crucial thing for us is to maintain the distinction among fear, anxiety
and shock. Fear. Is apprehension
where you know the object. Right. You are afraid of something specific.
Anxiety has to do with apprehension where you're not quite sure of what, right, so one is usually
anxious of something and one can have a general idea of what it is without
a specific object. And shock is traumatic
eruption, where you're not surprised, where you are completely surprised and completely unprepared
for an experience.
Now on the opposite page. Freud.
Describes his initial formulation of what has become an extremely famous
game that little children play. The English equivalent,
by the way, is peek-a-boo. So if you've ever played peekaboo with a small child,
basically what's happening is the same psychological experience for a describes in
Fort daaa. Fort means away. Derb means it's there.
Scuse me. So Freud describes
an experience with his nephew. And this is so famous and so amazing. I want to read the whole thing.
The child was in no respect forward in his intellectual development, but he made himself understood
by his parents and the maid servant and had a good reputation for behaving properly.
He did not disturb his parents at night. He scrupulously obeyed orders about not touching various objects
and not going into certain rooms. And above all, he never cried when his mother went out
and left him for hours together. Although the tie to his mother was a very close one,
she had not only nourished him herself, but it cared for him and brought him up without any outside
help. Occasionally, however, this well-behaved child evinced the troublesome habit
of flinging into the corner of the room or under the bed all the little things he could lay his hands on,
so that together up his toys was often no light task. He accompanied
this by expression of interest and gratification, emitting a loud and drawn out or.
Which in the judgment of the mother, one that coincided with my own, was not an
interjection but meant go away.
I saw at last that this was a game. And the child used
all his toys only to being gone, flirt, sign with them. One
day. I made an observation that confirmed
my view. The child had a wooden reel with a piece of string wound around it.
It never occurred to him, for example, to direct this after him on the floor. And so play horse and cart
with it. But he kept throwing it away with considerable skill held by the strain over
the side. It was a little draped cut so that the real disappeared into it.
Then said his significant or. And drew the real by the string out of
the card, again greeting its reappearance with a joyful DA. That's the joy
that kids feel when you playing peek a boo in your hands, go away. Right. And
you you were there. This was therefore the complete game
disappearance and return. The first act being the only one generally
observed by the onlookers and the one untiring Lee repeated by the child as a game
for its own sake. Although the greater pleasure unquestionably attached to the
second act. And then in the next paragraph, Freud talks about the significance
of Fort Dodge, which he understood as the great cultural achievement
of humanity, which seems silly, but if you think
about it, it's true. What the fought die
game does in miniature is to initiate us
into language, into representation, into the idea that a symbolic
action can mitigate the effect of reality.
So the reality is that young children. Lament
the absence of the mother or of nourishment or of warmth
or anything. And what they learn to do is to play a game
which gives them the. Illusion of an active mastery
of an experience that we all. Experienced passively.
So that's one part of the essay I want to introduce to you, and perhaps you can
imagine already its significance for. For culture,
for art, sports. And gaming.
Now, later in the essay, Freud talks about the repetition compulsion
of. World War 1 Veteran Super Traumatic.
Dreams that recur over and over and over again. Now,
this experienced, challenged Freud greatly because he had developed
his theory of the unconscious. Based on the idea of the pleasure principle,
which is that the essence of the human subject is pleasure.
And Freud described pleasure as reduction of tension. So
he didn't understand the psychic structure that made it necessary
for war veterans to experience something horrible. Over and over and over
and over and over again and beyond, the pleasure principle concludes.
With meditations on. What that means
thus. Beyond the pleasure principle.
There are two aspects of traumatic memory returning.
That made Froy realize. How? They
function. For a healthy psyche.
First. As in the Fort Dog game.
Dreams, images. The repetition of a memory,
even if it's a horrible one. Gives the human subject the illusion
of having an active control, even though it's minuscule.
Over an experience. That we experienced passively.
Right. So you can imagine a mind having been traumatized.
Reliving it over and over again. According to Freud's theory.
Is an attempt to represent it, to master it. To wrap one's.
Hands around it and control it, at least to some extent. That's the first
thing. The second thing. Is.
Having a fantasy of a traumatic return.
Implicitly gives the mind the illusion that it can
return to a place right before the trauma happened. That would
give you a sense of anticipation. Right. Because the essence of shock
is surprise and lack of preparation. So in a reenactment
in the representation of traumatic return, you imagine quite poignantly
that you can go back right before it happened and know that it's coming and therefore transform
trauma into a kind of fear or anxiety. Right. To give it a sense
of mastery. So in conclusion, here are the ways in which
this is extremely powerful. I think as a. Ground
explanation for why we play games. And particularly
like we play video games. Right. Because video games are interactive.
We play games. Just like we make
art. We play sports. The child
plays peekaboo so that we can actively master
in symbolic space. Reality that we experienced
passively. Secondly, in all of these video
games where somebody dies over and over and over again. And there's a return.
Like in limbo. Right. Unless you're a genius and can somehow get through the game without
this kid ever being chopped into pieces. And apparently there are some people who have done
that. But I find it incredibly hard to imagine.
From a practical point of view, you don't want a game that's over in 10 seconds, right? So you have
a kid like me chopped up and then returned to life and then you figure out how to get him past a certain
impediment. But that. Encourages us to forget the psychological
power of having a second chance, a third chance before it's chance, an infinite
number of chances to return to that place that Freud describes right before trauma.