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In his introduction to Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Intense Involvement in Sports, a collection of essays co-edited with Phillip Blumberg and Robert I. Watson Jr., Irwin Hirsch provides a candid and vulnerable welcome to the sports-involved psychoanalytic reader. Hirsch acknowledges struggling with shameful feelings about his preoccupation, confiding how much his mood is affected by whether his team wins or loses, and worrying that it is a possible “sign of immaturity” (p. 3). He tells us how “silly” he feels “writing about this in a scholarly venue” (pp. 2-3). Three pages into this book, drawn by a desire to understand more about my own fascination with the Golden State Warriors, I was hooked. Here was a comrade who shared my passions and anxieties and dared to speak them.
Did the essays that follow fulfill the introduction's promise? For the most part the answer is yes. Most offered either a sense of psychoanalyst-sports-comradery or a high-level of psychoanalytic scholarship. Some offered both.
The book is divided into three sections, the first two of which focus on sports and fandom through a psychoanalytic lens, while the third looks at the intersections of sports and psychoanalytic therapy.
In the first section, Jean Petrucelli's “Serve, Smash, and Self-states: Tennis on the Couch and Courting Steve Mitchell” stood out for a vulnerable autobiographical account of leveraging her skills on the tennis court to get Mitchell's attention when he seemed unengaged in their supervisory relationship. Although her discussion about how athletes cope with emotional regulation challenges was of interest, this personal story made her essay memorable.
I also responded to Adrienne Harris's personal disclosures in “Baseball's Bisexuality.” She tells us that baseball was, for her, a way to “find [her] father” (p. 13), as well as commenting, in passing, that the man she married just happened to be passionate about baseball as well. Her essay takes as its formal focus the transforma