Halloween

Although skeptics aren’t supposed to like Freud because of his questionable ethics and methods, I find his writings very interesting. And as a student of art history, I have had to read a lot of them. Although his work fails scientifically, I believe it still has some philosophical value. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), he writes about a game that he observed his grandson playing when he was a year and a half old, which he called “Fort/Da” or “Gone/There.” It consisted of the boy throwing small objects under furniture or into other such hiding places, forcing the adults to help him search for them. After he would throw or hide the objects he would say “fort,” the German word for “gone.” When the object would reappear he would say joyfully, “da!”, “there!”. Freud interpreted the game as an act of renunciation–the child replaying and thus reclaiming the stressful situation of his parents leaving him during the day. He could not control the adults, but he could toss away his toys and sometimes find them again. More often than not his toys could not be immediately found, which caused Freud to wonder why his grandson would repeat this painful action of parting himself with beloved objects. To explain the action, he suggested that the child turned the traumatic experience of being separated from his parents into a game in order to gain control over it. He writes, “At the outset he was in a passive situation–he was overpowered by the experience; but, by repeating it…as a game, he took on an active part.” So even though losing his toys was painful, he was in control, he was the one causing them to go away, to be “fort,” and thus had control over the situation. He then applied this concept to children in general, suggesting that the games they play, especially the ones that are dramatic or stressful, serve to give the child a sense of control over the stressful situations that they mimic in play.

I think that this concept can be expanded to explain Halloween. Children are able to dress up as things that scare them–ghosts, monsters, vampires, Darth Vader–and by assuming those roles they take away some of the characters’ power to scare. According to Freud’s idea, this sort of play, taking control over a stressful situation and becoming an active player, helps children overcome fear. They themselves become the scary thing, and suddenly they don’t seem quite so scary. It might even help them understand the concept of “imaginary.” They could be afraid of the concept of ghosts, but then after dressing up as one realize that ghosts are artifices, just as they themselves became an artificial ghost.

In my Christian home I was not allowed to engage in this sort of Halloween play, and as a consequence I remained very scared of the mythical creatures associated with the holiday. I was allowed to dress up, but never as anything scary. I couldn’t be a witch or a ghost or a vampire. I could be a princess or Cleopatra or a cowgirl, but nothing “dark.” My parents lent a great deal of weight to this concept of “dark” forces and characters, and thus asserted my fear in them instead of letting me conquer the fear through play.

When most children are afraid that a ghost may be in their closet, their parents comfort them by appealing to their reason and explaining that there is “no such thing” as ghosts. When I was afraid of ghosts I wasn’t told that they were just an effect of my imagination. I was told that they were real, but that they weren’t spirits of dead people that were once family and friends, they were demons. I was told that dark forces really did exist in the world, that there really were witches who worshiped the devil and sacrificed cats on Halloween night. I was told that demons were fighting for my soul, that the negative voices I heard in my head might be the whisperings of the minions of Satan, and that if I ever saw a ghost it was one of these minions in disguise. To comfort me, my parents told me that if I ever did encounter a demon, all I had to say was, “In Jesus name, leave!”, and they would obey the magic name, but that was cold comfort. I didn’t want to hear that I had the power to banish demons, I wanted to hear that demons weren’t real to begin with.

As a result of my parents irrational attitude toward forces of darkness, I lived often in fear, and especially on Halloween night. When other children were being told that it was all just a big fairy tale, I was being told that it was real. Every Halloween as a child I would lay awake in my bed with a light on, too afraid to be in the dark or close my eyes, truly terrified of the evil forces that were roaming the night. One particularly awful night we had forgotten to bring in the family cat and I spend the entire night sobbing, convinced that she was going to be mutilated by a coven of witches.

Sometimes when people ask, “What’s the harm of believing in religion?”, and claim that religion is a strictly positive entity that gives people peace, comfort, and hope I think back on those awful Halloween nights that I spent cowering under my covers. I think about the irrational set of beliefs that inspired my parents to tell their young child that ghosts and witches are real, and about the fear of darkness (both figurative and literal) that plagued my childhood years.

I’m so thankful that irrational beliefs no long have power over me, and that they no longer inflict psychological damage upon me. I can’t wait to have kids of my own and tell them assertively that there are no such things as ghost and that they have no reason to be afraid.

Tags: christanity, freud, halloween