Destiny of Drives and the Triangular Method: Starting Points for a Psychoanalytic Philosophy of Sport

ABSTRACT

This text argues that psychoanalytic philosophy is a valuable tool for the Philosophy of Sport. To situate it within the philosophical tradition, I place Freud’s ideas as an heir to the Philosophy of Impulse of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. Then, I explain how psychoanalytic philosophy can be understood as a form of hermeneutics, which aligns well with the interests of the field. I also recognise the importance of questioning whether we can consider sports and their events as analysable psychoanalytic facts. To this purpose, I use Paul Ricoeur’s methodological approach, which proposes to analyse collective and common phenomena hermeneutically as psychoanalytic facts. I demonstrate the consistency of this method and adapt it to the Philosophy of Sport. The method involves a triangular operation that analyses psychoanalytic facts by articulating their relationships of meaning (narratives, manifest content, memories and objects), their relationships of force (resistances, neurotic repetitions, symptoms, latent contents and transfers), and psychoanalytic theory. As an example, I apply this method to conduct a micro-psychoanalytic analysis of Brazil’s defeat to Germany in the 2014 FIFA World Cup, which the Brazilian coach referred to as a ‘blanked out’ moment. I observe that the destiny of drives, which Freud understood as the tendency of unconscious material to return to consciousness in the form of commitments to objects and symptoms, is prominent in sports reality. This may encourage us to see the potential of promising interpretations grounded in the Psychoanalytic Philosophy of Sport.

KEYWORDS:

• Sport
• psychoanalysis
• hermeneutics
• Ricoeur
• Freud

Disclosure Statement

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

Notes

1. For a better identification of the chronology of Freud’s works, I will use, as is common in the psychoanalytic field, the year of the original text, followed by the year of the edition that I am using.

2. Thomas Mann (1875-1955) in a work about Schopenhauer (1940, 24).

3. VON (2014) was the first to introduce the term ‘unconscious will’ into the philosophical discourse, in his work ‘Philosophy of the Unconscious’, from 1869, which significantly influenced Freud. However, it was Schopenhauer who, by developing the concept of Will, constructed a consistent and enduring conceptual framework in philosophy.

4. Our translation: (…) the facts in psychoanalysis are in no way observable behavioural facts. These are ‘reports’. We only know the dreams told on waking; the symptoms themselves, although partially observable, come within the scope of the analysis only in relation to other factors verbalised in the ‘report’. It is this selective restriction that forces us to situate the facts of psychoanalysis in a sphere of motivation and meaning.

5. Our translation: Essentially the following: the pair formed by the method of investigation and the method of treatment occupy exactly the same place as the operating procedures which, in the observational sciences, link the level of theoretical entities to that of observable facts. This pair constitutes the specific mediation between theory and facts in psychoanalysis. And this mediation operates in the following way: by coordinating the interpretation and handling of resistances, analytic praxis calls upon a theory in which the psyche is represented both as a text to be interpreted and as a system of forces to be manipulated.

6. For example, in the ‘Independent’ (UK), available at: https://www.independent.co.uk/sport/football/international/brazil-vs-germany-world-cup-2014-reaction-brazil-blanked-out-says-luiz-felipe-scolari-9594842.html