ABSTRACT
In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud discusses a child observed at home who repeatedly throws a toy away from his crib then reels it back in. Freud understands the child's repetition of throwing and fetching his toy to be the child attempting to master and overcome the traumatic sensation evoked by his mother leaving and returning. The child, through rehearsing that loss with material objects, through play, comes to be able to protect himself from psychic harm. Freud continues: At the outset he was in a passive situation, he was overpowered by the experience; but, by repeating it, unpleasurable though it was, as a game, he took on an active part. Freud discusses repetition and remembrance in terms of the relationship between analyst and analysand. Freud states that the patient "is obliged to repeat the repressed material as a contemporary experience instead of remembering it as something belonging to the past".
