Freud also noticed that the boy would utter his 'o-o-o-o' sound with reference to himself -notably when, by crouching down below a mirror, he made his image 'gone.' Freud stresses the fact that the fort part of the game was much of the time sufficient unto itself, and was 'repeated untiringly' by the child (1920g, pp. 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 ' fort.'' 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 ' Da! ' ('There!'). 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. 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. 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. In psychoanalysis, allusions to fort/da refer to the second chapter of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, where in a few celebrated pages Freud described and interpreted a game played by the little Ernst at the age of eighteen months. This pair of words -meaning 'Gone!' and 'There!' -has become shorthand for repetition in early childhood, and for the primary processes that such behavior mobilizes. ' Fort !' and ' Da !' are exclamations that Sigmund Freud heard his grandson Ernst utter while playing.

Forts game origins