Critically reviewing and comparing various psychoanalytic perspectives on conscious and unconscious motivations in sport, this paper contends that the appeal of sports participation may variously derive from its simultaneously involving the indulgence of pre-Oedipal and Oedipal symbolism within the outward maturity and disciplining frame of a post-Oedipal symbolic form. It considers differences between distinct psychoanalytic frames, favouring Kleinian and object relations above Lacanian approaches, based on their closer attention to the corporeality and sensuousness of sports participation and the conscious and unconscious fantasies embedded in it. Sport's sensuous corporeality, which enables its embodiment of pre-Oedipal fantasy as well as post-Oedipal submission to social reality, lies at the heart of its appeal.