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"<i>Fort</i>!" and "<i>Da</i>!" are exclamations that Sigmund [[Freud ]] heard his grandson Ernst utter while playing. This pair of words—meaning words—[[meaning]] "Gone!" and "There!"—has become shorthand for [[repetition ]] in early childhood, and for the primary [[processes ]] that such [[behavior ]] mobilizes.In [[psychoanalysis]], allusions to <i>fort/da</i> refer to the second chapter of <i>Beyond the [[Pleasure ]] [[Principle]]</i>, where in a few celebrated pages Freud described and [[interpreted ]] a [[game ]] played by the little Ernst at the age of eighteen months. At the [[time]], Freud was tackling the thorny problem of the [[compulsion ]] to [[repeat ]] in [[traumatic ]] [[neurosis]], and this digression into normal childhood [[experience ]] was in fact meant to [[help ]] contextualize the question. Ernst was a "[[good ]] little boy," manifested no [[particular ]] [[symptoms]], was rather calm by disposition, and "never cried when his [[mother ]] [[left ]] him for a few hours." But he "had an occasional disturbing habit of taking any small [[objects ]] he could get hold of and throwing [[them ]] away from him into a corner, under the bed. . . . As he did this he gave vent to a loud, long-drawn-out 'o-o-o-o,' accompanied by an expression of interest and [[satisfaction]]. His mother and the writer of the [[present ]] account were agreed in [[thinking ]] that this was not a mere interjection but represented the [[German ]] [[word ]] '<i>fort</i>."' Freud interpreted this behavior as a way of obtaining satisfaction by causing things to be "gone." A short time later he observed the [[child ]] 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 "<i>Da!</i>" ("There!"). Freud also noticed that the boy would utter his "o-o-o-o" sound with reference to <i>himself</i>—notably when, by crouching down below a [[mirror]], he made his [[image ]] "gone." Freud stresses the fact that the <i>fort</i> part of the game was much of the time sufficient unto itself, and was "repeated untiringly" by the child (1920g, pp. 14-15).This observation leads to a [[number ]] of fundamental questions: Are we confronted here by a method of mastering a painful experience by reproducing it oneself in an [[active ]] manner, as [[children ]] so often do, for example when playing frightening [[games]]? Or is the child literally taking revenge for the [[treatment ]] visited upon him by redirecting it onto the [[other]], or onto himself? 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. 14), the other revealing an irreducible primordial [[violence ]] that takes an especially virulent [[form]], according to Freud's account, when little Ernst, at thirty months, throws aside a toy and unequivocally [[identifies ]] it with his [[absent ]] [[father ]] who has been "sent to the front" (p. 16).

The <i>fort/da</i> game has inspired very many authors who have seen it as the embodiment of the institution of fundamental [[structures ]] of the [[infantile ]] psyche, though their emphasis varies according to tendency or [[school]]. 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 <i>fort</i>, 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.It is thus the <i>fort</i> game that is the more problematical, in that the [[subject ]] obtains from the disappearance of the other or of himself an [[unconscious ]] [[gratification ]] which runs counter to the most fundamental prohibitions. In view of his [[belief ]] in the omnipotence of [[thoughts]], the child cannot conceive of death or disappearance otherwise than as the outcome of a [[wish]]; he can form an [[idea ]] of these [[concepts ]] solely through [[seeing ]] and losing [[sight ]] of objects, so he [[links ]] these to the deployment of [[visual ]] [[desire]], thereby transforming [[trauma ]] into pleasure, albeit a [[forbidden ]] pleasure. In his account of <i>fort/da</i> play, Freud hints that the game was beneficial to Ernst, for, even though he was not free from feelings of [[jealousy ]] upon the arrival of a new sibling, he was well able to cope with the death of his mother a short time later. This was not to say, however, as Freud had noted in discussing "[[dreams ]] of the death of persons of whom the dreamer is fond" (1900a, pp. 248ff), that once the subject reaches [[adulthood]], and becomes aware of the [[true ]] meaning of death, they will not be assailed in a deferred way by the [[guilt]]-driven [[anxiety ]] that is to be seen in so many [[neuroses]].

# [[Freud, Sigmund]]. (1900a). The [[interpretation ]] of dreams. Part I, SE, 4: 1-338]]