Sluggers and Analysts: Batting for Average with the Psychoanalytic Unconscious

The Game of Baseball has some interesting areas of overlap with psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychotherapy. For example, sporting enthusiasts tell us that one of the hardest things to do in sports is the act of hitting a baseball. The act of striking a small spherical object moving at a high rate of speed with a cylindrical object is exceedingly difficult by itself. But that's only the beginning. The amount of time it takes a 90 mph fastball to leave the pitcher's hand and arrive in the catcher's glove is .41 seconds. It takes approximately .28 seconds to initiate and complete a full swing of the bat. This leaves the batter about .13 seconds to determine whether or not he likes the pitch, decide to swing at it or not, and then where to swing the bat. Moreover, if the batter's swing is .03 seconds off in either direction (i.e., being ahead or behind the pitch), he will miss the ball entirely. If the quartzlike precision in timing involved in hitting a ball were not difficult enough, there are also 13 points of movement in the human body involved in the motion of swinging a bat, all of which have to be perfectly coordinated in order to make contact with the ball, much less hit it well enough to get on base. As the batter performs the motion of swinging a bat to hit the ball, he cannot focus conscious attention on what his body is doing, for such concentrated awareness would seriously interfere with his task and likely cause him to distort his swing in a way that would make him miss the ball. He must, in other words, perform his skill in a state of relative unconsciousness.

Needless to say, hitting a baseball is a very complex process that requires a great deal of skill, training, and practice. In this article, I explore how our work as analytic therapists might be similar to the batter's task in complexity, timing, and unconscious action. Sometimes it may feel like the patient is hurling a wild and confusing assortment of pitches in our direction, and deciding in