Freud’s Psychoanalysis and the Genealogy of Sport

ABSTRACT

Freudian psychoanalysis offers us often neglected but unique and very fruitful possibilities for an original interpretation of sport. In this article we first look at some basic Freudian concepts, such as the role of sexuality, the unconscious and dreams. In doing so, it becomes clear that sport can and should be interpreted in a similar way to Freud’s interpretation of dreams. Just as dreams need to be decoded and interpreted, sport needs to be decoded and interpreted in order to understand it. On this basis, we then build a system for understanding sport that also incorporates the other important concepts of Freud’s psychoanalysis. The concepts of repression, symptom formation and the role of symbols prove to be particularly relevant for understanding sport. Decoding symbols in sport (e.g. scoring a goal) shows us that sport is a derivative of the libido and has an unconscious sexual structure. Unveiling the hidden unconscious sexuality of sport shows us that (male) sport was created for the sake of women, so that men (as winners) could gain a privileged status in female desire. Sport turns out to be a symbolic substitute for the satisfaction of human sexual needs. However, to better understand the competitive nature of sport, one must include the Oedipus and castration complex. It is castration anxiety that drives sporting competition. Victory is symbolically linked to the castration of the opponent. Next we turn to Freud’s concept of transference. It helps us to understand the complexity of the relationship between the athlete and the coach. This has a strong influence on athletic success. When things do not go as planned for an athlete and unexpected injuries occur, Freud’s concept of ‘advantage through illness’ can help us understand the athlete’s ‘escape into injury’.

KEYWORDS:

• Sport
• dreams
• symbols
• pleasure
• transference

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Sandra Meeuwsen for her encouragement to participate and for her comments on early versions of the paper. I am also deeply indebted to Roman Vodeb for his help and suggestions. Finally, I am very grateful to the reviewers for their careful reading, as their comments helped me a lot to improve the paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Our second reference is the Slovenian philosopher and psychoanalyst Roman Vodeb and his psychoanalytic interpretation of sport. Vodeb is known for trying to follow the original Freud faithfully, so he is often considered a radical thinker (Kreft 2015, 222).

2. The link between sexual repression and the rise of sport was recognised as early as the mid-nineteenth century in Victorian England. Organised sport (especially football) went hand in hand with the repression of sexuality, which had an important educational moment (Winner 2013, 9). Similarly, Collins wrote in his book How Football Began (Collins 2019, 18): ‘Healthy minds were those seen as free of sin and moral weakness, and vigorous football was promoted as a reliable antidote to the great triangular fear of the Victorian public schools: masturbation, effeminacy and homosexuality’.

3. Freud very slowly came to accept that there was an instinct which was entirely independent of anything sexual (Storr 1989, 65). Beside eros or the sexual instincts there is also thanatos or the death-instinct, a natural desire to ‘re-establish a state of things that was disturbed by the emergence of life’ (Freud 1923, 25; Freud 1920a freud 1920b). In this paper we will focus on sexual instinct. For possible implication of thanatos in sport see Meeuwsen (2020, 122–129).

4. It is worth noting that sport was a (physical) cultural activity of humanity from the beginning.

5. As early as 1926, Helene Deutsch, a student of Freud, understood sport as a kind of safety valve for human beings (Deutsch 1992, 152).

6. Freud himself recognised that ‘small actions which are performed apparently by chance and without any purpose—habits of playing or fiddling with things, and so on—[are] revealed … as “symptomatic actions” linked with a hidden meaning and intended to give unobstrusive expression to it’ (Freud 1906, 105).

7. In his psychoanalytic interpretation of football, Oakley (2007) also links sport to dreams, but in a somehow different way. Psychoanalysis and football function as a dream space. Football is the living of a dream and the modern day Roman coliseum in which gladiators rip apart the opposition. Football, as is analysis, is about enabling a capacity to dream and express and think through difficult emotions and impulses.

8. In psychoanalysis, the superego is the faculty that seeks to police what it deems unacceptable desires; it represents all moral restrictions” (Felluga 2015, 301–302). ‘The super-ego retains the character of the father, while the more intense the Oedipus complex was and the more rapidly it succumbed to repression (under the influence of discipline, religious teaching, schooling and reading), the more exacting later on is the domination of the super-ego over the ego—in the form of conscience or perhaps of an unconscious sense of guilt’ (Freud 1923, 34).

9. Historically, sport was primarily a male activity—men invented sport out of their desire. There were already some competitions for women in ancient Greece. However, they did not play an important role in the development of sport in the broader sense. However, as we will show below, Freud’s psychoanalysis can also interpret contemporary women’s sport, which differs in many ways from men’s sport.

10. For this reason, sex before competition can have a negative effect on an athlete’s performance in competition. An athlete who has ‘won’ the night before a competition, i.e. has sexually conquered a woman, does not need to prove himself further in the competition itself. The libidinous energy and thus also the aggressiveness therefore decrease. On the other hand, sexual abstinence or quarantine essentially increases desire and excitement, which is related to increased pleasure in the game, but also has an effect on increased aggressiveness in the fight with the opponent and thus on better performance.

11. In this respect, we could say that there are sports that are closer to the feminine nature. These are sports of aesthetics and elegance, such as rhythmic gymnastics, figure skating, dance, etc.

12. According to Freud, Sophocles’ play Oedipus Rex illustrates a formative phase in the psychosexual development of every human being. In this phase, the child, the boy, directs his libido towards his mother and accordingly feels a jealous hatred for his father with a simultaneous tendency to identify with him. In response to such tendencies, the child develops castration anxiety, a fantasy of losing his penis as punishment for aggressive tendencies towards his father. According to Freud, this fear drives libidinous development one stage further: the boy’s aggressive tendencies towards his father are transformed into the adoption of parental authority into his own personality; the libido of the Oedipus complex loses much of its sexual character and is ‘sublimated’, transformed into tender feelings. In effect, the superego emerges and represents the internalisation of the father and his prohibitions—and therefore manifests as conscience and guilt. The psychoanalytical interpretation of the ethics of sport is based on the establishment of the superego.

13. In classical Greek drama, Electra gets her brother Orestes to have the boy murder their mother, Clytemnestra, who has murdered her husband and their father, King Agamemnon.

14. Transference in psychoanalysis means that the patient transfers his past psychosexual conflicts (the conflicts that led to the symptoms) to the relationship between the analyst and the patient (the analysand). The essence of transference is the ‘transference of emotions to the person of the physician’ (Freud 1920a, 382). For example, someone who is still trying to work through the Oedipus complex may transfer his or her feelings for the father (e.g. hatred) to the analysand and thus act them out in the talking cure. Once the earlier conflict is acted out in this way, the analyst strives to make the patient realise that he is thus transferring his feelings to the analyst (trying to make the patient aware of what was previously repressed in the unconscious); the analyst also tries to guide the patient to an alternative, healthier resolution of the original conflict, leading to the elimination of the symptom.

15. There are two very well-known examples from Slovenia: The best alpine skier Tina Maze fell in love and married her coach Andrea Massi. Also the best cross-country skier Petra Majdič fell in love and married her coach Ivan Hudač. For many other cases see Wertheim (2001).