Seeking and Confronting Self-Imposed Challenges Set One Free: Suits, Psychoanalysis, and Sport Philosophy

ABSTRACT

Since Sigmund Freud developed and popularized psychoanalysis, this psychological theory has significantly influenced contemporary thinking, particularly in philosophical disciplines focused on understanding human behavior and addressing social problems. Take the examples of political philosophy, race theory, and feminist thought, among many others. However, although sport philosophy qualifies as one such discipline, scholars in this field have given little to no attention to psychoanalysis and psychoanalytical theorists. Remarkably, psychoanalytical notions, especially those of Eric Berne and Norman O. Brown, significantly shaped Bernard Suits’ pioneering thoughts on games. Nevertheless, sport philosophers have largely overlooked the importance of psychoanalysis in Suits’ examinations of games and, more broadly speaking, rarely attempted to apply psychoanalytical concepts to their analyses of sport. In this paper, I explain the psychoanalytical roots of Suits’ theory of games and explore how much of his theory of games is indebted to psychoanalysis. Specifically, I first compare Suits’ analysis of unconscious gameplay to psychoanalytic concepts of repression and neurosis. Subsequently, I explore the alignment between Suits’ views on gameplay and psychoanalytic accounts of play and pleasure. To conclude, I examine the therapeutic and emancipatory character of Suits’ proposal, drawing parallels between his philosophical corpus and critical theorists whose critical analyses of modern society are heavily indebted to Freud.

KEYWORDS:

• Psychoanalysis
• repression
• gameplay
• emancipation
• autonomy

Acknowledgments

I express my gratitude to Sandra Meeuwsen, Marie-Caroline Gallot, and Andrew Edgard, the editors of this special issue, for their comments on early versions of the abstract for this article. Additionally, I am thankful for the valuable input from the journal’s two anonymous reviewers and my esteemed colleagues of the Penn State History and Philosophy of Sport Journal Club, namely Michelle Sikes, Jaime Schultz, Mark Dyreson, Zach Bigalke, Cam Mallet, Aaron Bonsu, and Taliah Powers. Lastly, I am indebted to Odilon José Roble, whose presentation on psychoanalysis and sport philosophy at the ALFiD/AEFD Online Seminar on November 17th, 2022, inspired me to explore the connections among psychoanalysis, Romantic philosophy, and Freud.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author

Notes

1. Notes.

McFee does not use the term ‘hermeneutic’. However, this term encompasses multiple defining elements of McFee’s view of psychoanalysis, including, but not limited to, the understanding of athletes and sporting situations, the particularistic emphasis of psychoanalytical therapy, and the rejection of the atomistic understandings of the individual in favor of socially-embedded ones. For an extensive analysis of the hermeneutic features of psychoanalysis, see Ricoeur (1970).

2. Some examples sport philosophical works that have contributed the exploration of these humanistic and hermeneutic aspects, are Edgar (2013), Feezell (2013), Parry Martínková (2012), and Tuncel (2019).

3. Suits writes his book in a dialogical form, which significantly deviates from philosophical essayistic practices, and rarely identifies his sources through quotations or footnotes.

4. As one of the anonymous reviewers noted, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud (1959) discovers the death drive while examining a game that he observed his grandson, Ernst, play over the years. Freud calls the game ‘fort-da’, meaning ‘gone-there’, and links it to negative experiences contrary to the search for pleasure. Interestingly, one potential interpretation of the game that Freud offers is rather Suitsian. The child uses mastery to turn an unhappy situation (i.e. his toy is gone, which symbolizes an experience over which the child has no control, namely the presence of their parents) into a happy one (i.e. he recovers his toy, which represents the parents’ return upon the call of the child).

5. López Frías (2021) offers an extensive examination of these mechanisms.

6. Avery Kolers’ works are a notable exception. See Kolers (2015).

7. Freud drew these notions from Arthur Schopenhauer. See Razinsky (2013).

8. Suits, given his well-known aversion to continental philosophical approaches, would most likely resist this interpretation.

9. For an in-depth analysis of this Freudian notion, see Balibar (2022) and Razinsky (2013).

10. In Grasshopper Soup, the article is included as ‘Six Ways to Play a Game Without Knowing It’, which, in Return of the Grasshopper: Games, Leisure and the Good Life in the Third Millennium, Suits splits into two chapters: ‘Three Ways to Play a Game Without Knowing It’ and ‘Three More Ways to Play a Game Without Knowing It’.

11. People do connect non-game activities, such as business, to games, especially sport. For instance, sport- and game-related metaphors are commonplace. However, Suits (1967, 1982) contends that when people connect social activities or everyday life occurrences to games, they regard them as if they were games, not as actual games.

12. In Return of the Grasshopper, referencing economist and sociologist Thorstein Veblen’s views on conspicuous consumption, Suits explains that games occur in multiple types of settings, including capitalist markets: ‘I suggest that industrial and financial giants, dread any tendencies they regard as socialist not only because it threatens their personal accumulations of wealth, but perhaps more importantly because it threatens the market capitalism that they have made their playground. And this speculation is not mere fancy. The question ordinary people so often raise about the very wealthy commonly takes the form of asking why they continue to accumulate more and more money, since they can use only so many cars, mansions, and yachts. But Veblen answered that question long ago, did he not? Conspicuous consumption has to do not with the usefulness of the items accumulated, but only with what that accumulation signifies. Very expensive toys are the signs of lusory success, and so testaments to the glory of big winners. Their cars are not meant to be driven, their mansions occupied, or their yachts sailed. They are the trophies that adorn the game rooms of their owners’ (Suits 2022, 89). In Suitsian terms, most consumption efforts by wealthy people do not have an instrumental character (i.e. serve a production function). Rather, they are play moves in an interconnected web of unnecessary obstacles whose achievement signifies social success.

13. This second interpretation may include the interpretation that life is a game, but they are mutually independent. Thus, Suits’ view of the relationship between games and life accepts three potential formulations: (a) life is a game that incorporates death; (b) a good life involves playing games; and (c) life is a game that includes death and, when lived well, entails playing interlocking games. Although Suits’ position in this regard remains to be clarified, what is indisputable is that playing games is an essential component of the good life (Bäck 2008; Hurka and Tasioulas 2006; McLaughlin 2008; Yorke 2019).

14. Notably, Freud states that humans can view works as a source of satisfaction rather than repression: ‘Professional activity is a source of special satisfaction if it is a freely chosen one … yet, as a path to happiness, work is not highly prized by men … The great majority of people only work under stress of necessity, and this natural human aversion to work raises most difficult social problems’ (Freud 1961a, 80 fn.1).

15. As one of the anonymous reviewers rightly pointed out, Freud provided two partly incongruent formulations of the ‘split mind’. Here, I employ his typology in Civilization and its discontents.

16. In 1980, two years after the publication of The Grasshopper, famous anarchist and anti-work writer Bob Black argued for the abolition of work and advocated the development of a play-like existence: ‘Work is the source of nearly all the misery in the world … In order to stop suffering, we have to stop working. That doesn’t mean we have to stop doing things. It does mean creating a new way of life based on play; in other words, a ludic revolution’ (Black, 1986, p. 17). Toward the end of his essay, ‘The Abolition of Work’, in strong alignment with Suits’ theses on life and games, Black asserts: ‘Life will become a game, or rather many games, but not—as it is now—a zero/sum game’ (Black, 1986, p. 33). The idea of eliminating work and constructing society upon radically different principles was far from new in the 1980s. Philosopher Bertrand Russell’s 1935 book, In Praise of Idleness and Other Essays, proposes reconfiguring society to provide individuals with more time to enjoy leisure time and engage in activities that would allow them to develop higher, intellectual virtues (for a critique of this proposal, see Danaher, 2019). The end goal of Suits’ theory of games brings to mind those of Black and Russell. Yet, Suits does not allude to their proposals despite their popularity when Suits wrote about utopia.

17. For more on the function his utopian construct plays in Suits’ philosophy, see (López Frías 2017, 2016).

18. Based on several copies of the book’s table of contents, Suits intended this manuscript as an epilogue to several versions of Return of the Grasshopper (Suits, 1990). However, none of the book manuscripts preserved today features the text. In other versions of the table of contents, the epilogue is subtitled ‘The End of Civilization’ (Suits, 1980, 3).

19. ‘Heuschrecke’ means ‘Grasshopper’ in German.

20. An extensive analysis of Suits’ views of autonomy is beyond the scope of this paper. See López Frías 2022.

21. Interestingly, Suits argues that one can arrive at the answers he formulates to whether life is a game through philosophical means. However, he notes that ‘it would not be inappropriate, to enter into a psychological (or psychiatric) account of why we do not want to know that life is a game we are playing’ (Suits 1967, 210).

22. Kant’s notion of autonomy also influenced Freud. See Altman (2023).

23. This assimilates Suits’ project to the philosophical account he most heavily opposed, namely that of Wittgenstein. For the German philosopher of language, philosophy is a therapeutic activity aimed at curing diseases of the intellect (Harcourt 2023).