You likely have never asked yourself what psychoanalysis and baseball have to do with one another. A discussion with Robert Pyles, president-elect of the American Psychoanalytic Association, might change some of your ways of thinking about the broader applications of psychoanalytic ideas.
Among his numerous activities, Pyles functions as a psychiatric consultant to athletes and to various sports-related programs. The latter include a program to address the psychological needs of young professional baseball players, sponsored by the Major League Commissioner's Office and the Players Association. This program is structured as a three-day retreat, with a program of lectures on particular topics and small group discussions. Each baseball team is allowed to send its three most promising rookies; in addition to the psychiatric consultants, there are veteran players in attendance. The retreat focuses on addressing the developmental problems faced by the young men who will enact the spectacle of the great American pastime, baseball.
Steeped in an all-American ethic, Pyles grew up near Winston-Salem, N.C. One of the area's cultural offerings was a farm team of the Red Sox called the Winston-Salem Cardinals. As a boy, Pyles was a member of the notorious “Knot Hole Gang” whose express mission was to guard the fence surrounding the playing field and uphold the secrecy of the practice games. “What happened was — we all watched,” he recalls. The gang's motto was, “We don't smoke, we don't chew, we don't go with girls that do.” This primal image of the game and its audience has been tarnished over the years as far as the major leagues are concerned. The strike, the inflated salaries, the behaviors of some of the individual players, and the ever more prurient media have revealed some of what may have been repressed by the great American fantasy. The owners and the Players Association, usually adversarial bodies, are trying to restore the image of baseball as the family sport. And beyond the concern about the public image of baseball, there has been a developing awareness on the part of owners and managers that the majority of what athletes have to go through is mental, in terms of performance and other pressures.
While cognitive techniques and “behavior training” to enhance athletic performance are an accepted approach to sports psychology, the introduction of psychoanalytic insights is relatively new. Pyles describes this as a “field wide open…. Psychoanalysis has a tremendous amount to contribute to the understanding of sports and performance. And I think the study of sports could teach us a lot about psychoanalysis as well.” Indicative of the growing interest in the psychoanalytic understanding of sports is the recent creation of The American's Committee on Psychoanalysis and Sport, chaired by Sander Abend.
Individual baseball players are vulnerable to a variety of problems, including addictions to drugs, alcohol, and gambling. Pyles believes these are symptoms of underlying narcissistic issues. By virtue of his athletic talents and training, a young player's sense of himself is characterized by omnipotence, magical thinking, and grandiosity. “Athletes are phenomenally superstitious, and everybody has their rituals,” Pyles notes.
These young men are thrown into a context of constant travel, adoration by millions of fans, sudden financial success, hounding media, and the attentions of criminal and business interests. Their elevated sense of omnipotence, paradoxically necessary for their success as athletes, is the very thing that renders them vulnerable. Pyles points out that the need to work together as a team inherently sets a limit on this fatal narcissism. However, he also notes an intense focus on winning, which can be detrimental to the individual. The rookies taking part in the retreat by and large haven't yet established themselves on the teams and are under tremendous pressure to do so. These are some of the reasons why they are very open to the idea of an unconscious. They welcome the notion that unrecognized factors may affect their performance. In general, says Pyles, the athletes show “a lot of sophistication about the role of the mind in physical performance.” As an example of this, Pyles described one rookie who had been in a batting slump: “He discovered that this slump had coincided with the anniversary of his father's death. Recognizing this and working it through helped him out of the slump.”
If we can speak of a healthy narcissism, perhaps we can also refer to a healthy alienation, a consciousness of the gap between the “I” and the public or social image. Pyles notes that a common subjective experience described by these young men is the feeling that the way they are seen by others is different from how they feel about themselves. Some of the athletes who behave badly have lost the distinction between the superhero role they've stepped into and who they really are. The outrageous image of the athlete has burgeoned into an industry.
Nevertheless, Pyles has been impressed, by and large, with the thoughtfulness of the young baseball players he has met during the retreats, their awareness of who they are, and their sense of responsibility in their personal and professional lives. This is the charm of latency brought forth into young adulthood. Pyles has noted a readiness to admit to the privilege they have been granted — to be paid to play their beloved boyhood game — on the part of both rookies and veteran players at the retreat (many of whom rank among the legends of the sport). This license to so perfectly fuse play and work is one they are both conscious of and grateful for, and there is thus a great deal of therapeutic leverage for a psychoanalyst taking part in the retreat.
The fact that the small group activities during the retreat are deliberately structured to mirror that of a baseball team (with a veteran player who is analogous to the coach and a group of rookies) is less significant, from an analytic point of view, than the fact of its being a male group devoted to a task, with a strong paternal figure. Perhaps not so parenthetically, the existence of a few female consultants at the retreat does not alter the masculine nature of this world. Pyles's impression is that the women involved in the retreat feel perfectly respected as human beings. Perhaps the world of the
Jessica Miller, Ph.D., a clinical psychologist with an interest in the philosophy of Jacques Lacan, is an advanced candidate at the Psychoanalytic Institute of New England, East. She practices psychoanalysis in Cambridge, Mass.
baseball team is based on a repression or the feminine while retaining an appreciation of the separate existence of the other. This is a solution specific to latency with which men and women could be equally comfortable. The “transference” described by Pyles would seem to be a latency transference: The other is a compatriot, a fellow player on the team.
This denial of the feminine in the service of carrying out a higher task, one whose honorable dimension is in the manifest forefront, harks back to the tragic game of war. This is evident in Pyles's comments that “sports are the quintessential demonstration of power.” Team sports are war sports, and they operate within the traditional male structure of a hunting party. The psychology of some other professional games (such as hockey and football) involves a more open and active sense of threat by the feminine and toward actual women, who have come to embody the dreaded passive position that these athletes must continually ward off. The unconscious is not accessible through such open displays of primitive aggression.
Pyles notes the predominance of the figure of a father-like hero in the lives and the psyches of the baseball players. He reports, “Nearly all of them have had some really crucial relationship with an important male figure who has encouraged and supported them. One of the first things that the person who introduces the program will do is to go around the room asking, ‘Who are your heroes?‘” The role of the psychiatrist here is to assume the position of support for the idealized transferential object.
The athlete is protected from having to come to terms with the limits to his omnipotence, and this may be where the position of the sports consultant differs from that of the psychoanalyst. The baseball players “get into trouble when their sense of omnipotence, or its flip side, helplessness, takes over. Either side of the regression to the more primitive narcissism can make them vulnerable,” says Pyles. The retreat is an effort to prevent these kinds of destructive regressions, through a deliberate effort to shore up the image of the paternal function and of the model of the male group. One of the issues that major league management is concerned about is what happens to individual athletes when they retire. The depression that goes along with the realization of the limits of one's omnipotence is artificially put off during a sports career. “When athletes get old or injured, they lose the kind of virile omnipotence they experienced as part of the game,” says Pyles.
Pyles has seen some professional athletes in intensive therapy, where he has had the opportunity to explore the psychological meaning of the sport and the role that sports plays in the adaptive capacities of the individual. His overall approach as a psychoanalyst, in whatever setting he finds himself, is to understand the meaning of an activity, the ways individuals cope with their lives. “What you always find,” he says, “is the location of the transferential object … what is being recreated and re-enacted as an expression of these important relationships with the primary objects.”
Why did Pyles head in this particular direction as a psychoanalyst? “Because that's how I grew up,” he told me. “Those are my early heroes. This is what I remember most about growing up in a tiny town in Tobacco Road' when the country was recovering from the Depression. All of the hope of the people of the town was centered on sports…. Baseball teams coming from other towns obtained the status of evil empires whose defeat was deserving of everyone's attention. There was a tremendous feeling of excitement and camaraderie…. And my father was the announcer. The first football game I played, I broke through the line to make the first tackle. And I heard my father over the PA system cheering for me.”
Pyles brings to the field of sports psychology — directly a function of his being a psychoanalyst — an appreciation that sports articulates an unconscious fantasy of loss. This articulation gives pleasure both to the athletes and to the spectators.