The "Fort / Da" Game

In Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), Sigmund Freud relates the story of a game his grandson invented at the age of one and a half, before he could speak many words. He used to throw small objects away from him, then say "o-o-o-o" with pleasure. He also took a wooden reel attached to a piece of string, and threw it over the edge of his cot, so that it disappeared. After saying "o-o-o-o," he would pull it back to himself and say, "da." He repeated this game over and over. Freud and the boy’s mother understood him to be saying "Fort" and "Da" (German for gone and there).

Freud theorized that this game of disappearance and return allowed the boy to manage his anxiety about the absences of his mother, to whom he was very attached. By controlling the actual presence and absence of an object, he was able to manage the virtual presence of his mother. The Fort / Da game was the child’s invention of symbolism: the use of one object (wooden reel) to represent another, absent object (mother).

In human psychological development, symbolism coincides with the emergence of language, or the child’s entry into the field of culturally symbolic sounds and words. Language is one way we give presence to (or re-present) people, ideas, events, and feelings. It’s how we recover the past, or make what is gone, there.

Freud's grandson was not merely re-presenting his mother as a symbolic object. More importantly, he was representing a relationship (with mother) and coming to terms with a concept (mother can be gone yet still there, in memory and play).

D. Willbern (1999)