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For Watson, Freud's discussion of the “Fort/Da Game” in Beyond the Pleasure Principle is really an interpretation in which Freud and his infant subject are in a
conspiracy to render the mother into a manipulable object. It is a story of the mother's power and desire, in that little Ernst is not playing the role of his more masterful self, powerful over his mother, but is assuming the more complex role of being his mother's subjective presence and assuming her power over him. The Fort/Da Game thus presents the mother's language in her own right, and it is the mother's desire rather than the father which splits the original dyadic fusion. Not only the loss of the mother but death itself is insinuated in this splitting. The Fort/Da Game is a “guy's' version of playing with dolls, playing at mothering by playing around with his beginnings and reproductive possibilities. Beyond mastery of the mother there can be the achievement by the child of a mutually ennobling relationship of identification and love, like a psychoanalytic interpretation which forgoes mastery.