Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Intense Involvement in Sports

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.

Irwin Hirsch, Ph.D., supervises and teaches at the Manhattan Institute for Psychoanalysis, the William Alanson White Institute and the NYU Postdoctoral Program and at other psychoanalytic institutes nationally

Phillip Blumberg, Ph.D., is a faculty member and supervisor at the William Alanson White Institute and Adjunct Associate Professor in the doctoral program in Clinical Psychology at Teachers College, Columbia University.

Robert I. Watson, Jr., Ph.D., is a supervising psychoanalyst at the William Alanson White Institute and faculty member at the Institute for Contemporary Psychotherapy.