Description
This book is a unique volume that brings a variety of psychoanalytic perspectives to the study of sport. It highlights the importance of sports for different individuals and how the function and use of sports can be brought into the consulting room.
Passionate interest in actively engaging in sports is a universal phenomenon. It is striking that this aspect of human life, prior to this volume, has received little attention in the literature of psychoanalysis. This edited volume is comprised largely of psychoanalysts who are themselves avidly involved with sports. It is suggested that intense involvement in sports prioritizes commitment and active engagement over passivity and that such involvement provides an emotionally tinged distraction from the various misfortunes of life. Indeed, the ups and downs in mood related to athletic victory or defeat often supplant, temporarily, matters in life that may be more personally urgent. Engaging in sports or rooting for teams provides a feeling of community and a sense of identification with like-minded others, even among those who are part of other communities and have sufficient communal identifications.
This book offers a better psychoanalytic understanding of sports to help us discover more about ourselves, our patients and our culture, and will be of great interest to psychotherapists and psychoanalysts, or anyone with an interest in sport and its link to psychoanalysis and mental health.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
List of Contributors
Introduction: on intense involvement in sports
Irwin Hirsch
Psychoanalytic perspectives on intense involvement in sports
- Baseball’s bisexuality
- Some reflections on the romance and degradation of sports: watching and metawatching in the changing transitional space of sport
- Revaluing sports
- The sensibility of baseball: structure, imagination, and the resolution of paradox
- Serve, smash, and self-states: tennis on the couch and courting Steve Mitchell
- The faith of the fan
- A relational view of passion in sports and the group experience
- Sports—applied psychoanalysis: par excellence
- Early adolescence and the search for idealization through basketball and its celebrities: a developmental perspective
- The athlete’s dream
- Recommend aerobic activity to our patients? One psychoanalyst’s perspective
- Marathons, mothering, and the maelstrom of trauma: running away with yourself
Adrienne Harris
Steven Cooper
Don Greif
Stephen Seligman
Jean Petrucelli
A psychoanalytic look at sports fandom
W. B. Carnochan
Robert I. Watson, Jr.
James Hansell
Sports and psychoanalytic therapy
Christopher Bonovitz
Howard M. Katz
John V. O’Leary
Stephanie Roth-Goldberg
Index
