I have been working with various professional and serious amateur athletes and performing artists for some 25 years. Like many situations that lead us to our psychoanalytic understanding, mine began with a personal trauma. I had been an athlete in high school and college, playing football, track, and fencing. But like most of my generation, once I graduated from college and went into medical and analytic training, I considered my athletic career to be over.
The two primary themes that emerge almost every year in every group are concerns about performance and relationships.
In my early thirties I developed several life-threatening illnesses. These were diseases for which no medical treatment was available at the time. The usual course was gradual decline and eventual death. As a way of dealing with the physical and psychological stress of these very serious personal crises, and not knowing what else to do to cope with my sense of personal helplessness, I began to run.
At about that time, in 1972, Frank Shorter had won the Olympic Marathon for the United States, the first time an American had won this event. This set off a running boom, which has continued more or less unabated. When I first began to run, I found I had allowed myself to lapse into terrible physical condition. I could barely go a half-mile without stopping. But I kept at it, eventually running a total of 47 marathons, including 27 Boston Marathons, one in Dublin, and a most memorable marathon in Greece, which covered the original route run by Pheidippides in 490 BC: starting at the site of the Battle of Marathon and ending in the 1897 stadium in Athens, built for the first modern Olympics.
Running sometimes 1500-2000 miles per year, I ultimately lost 40 pounds, and became a complete vegetarian. Over a seven-year period, my illnesses disappeared and I began to feel pretty invulnerable. As I increased my mileage and began to train for my first Boston Marathon, I broke my foot two weeks before the race. To my astonishment, I became literally clinically depressed. I discussed this with the sports medicine orthopedic group that I consulted. They explained to me that this reaction to sports injuries was common. In fact, one of the worst problems they had to deal with in treating injured athletes, was that the athlete would return to activity much too soon, often exacerbating injuries and complicating recovery. They could not understand why these athletes would not follow orders and go through an orderly rehabilitation.
Intrigued, I began talking to marathoners, many of whom were my friends. I found that everyone had a particular personal story in which endurance running became an adaptive measure for dealing with some crisis or difficulty in their physical or emotional lives. As I began to understand it in myself, I also began to understand in others the central role of athletic activity to psychic equilibrium. This seemed to be particularly true of those who had experienced some success in sports.
I began to develop ways of teaching my orthopedic colleagues basic psychoanalytic evaluation techniques to deal with their patients. I later carried this on to working with coaches and trainers of sports teams. Using case examples, I explained the adaptive value of the sense of mastery in dealing with feelings of helplessness, depression, and anxiety. They began to appreciate the symbolic meaning for each individual of his or her particular sport. For example, there was a young woman who used what she referred to as “conversations with God” as a means to deal with her depression. She could only have these conversations while she was running, for reasons connected to early experiences with parent figures. Only when this was interpreted was she able to stop her exercise long enough to heal.
Further, I explained the concept of the sense of self and the sense of personal identity that is often embodied in the person's ability to perform in his sport or activity. They were especially interested in the effect of injury on the sense of self, and how injury threatened the sense of omnipotence and resulted in narcissistic regression. They were fascinated by the concept of internalized objects and transference. Talented athletes have often been mentored and more or less adopted early in life by coaches and trainers, and also have received enormous gratification from proud parents. An injured athlete loses all of these benefits, and many of them therefore cannot forego their sport. As one described how he felt when injured, “I am a wounded animal. Approach me at your peril.”
For 12 years now, I have been involved in the Major League Baseball Rookie Development Program, which is jointly sponsored by Major League Baseball owners and the Players Association. Each of the 30 major league teams is entitled to send its three best rookies. The program offers a thorough grounding in issues that the first-year players will face: dealing
Bob Pyles, M.D., is president-elect of the American Psychoanalytic Association. He has served as a consultant to the Major League Baseball Rookie Development Program. He discussed the psychoanalytic treatment of athletes in Barcelona at the 2008 European Psychoanalytical Federation.
with the media, drugs and alcohol (particularly steroids and performance-enhancing drugs), financial scams, and temptations of various sorts the players will meet on the road, including encounters with women.
Over the years, psychotherapists, mostly psychoanalysts, have worked with Second City, a famous comedy acting group, to prepare relevant brief scenarios which enact situations the players will face. The actors use the technique of spontaneous “improvisation,” basically free association on stage, and encourage the players to do the same. On one level the program is designed to help with practical advice on how to deal with difficult situations, but on another level the purpose is to stimulate thinking and questions for later consideration in small discussion groups.
Issues that are brought up within the scenarios include sexual harassment, rookies dealing with veteran players, cultural differences between players of different races, prejudice, poor athletic performance, provocative media situations, and difficulties with relationships with family and loved ones, particularly wives and girlfriends.
Four or five scenarios are played out. The players then adjourn to small discussion groups of eight to ten, with one veteran retired player and one psychotherapist. The importance of the veterans cannot be overestimated because these are quite often famous and legendary players, who act as role models and begin discussions for each of the groups.
The two primary themes that emerge almost every year in every group are concerns about performance and relationships. The pressures on these young men to perform are enormous. The difference between a beginning player and one who has established himself in the league for several years is, quite literally, millions of dollars. As we discuss various psychological performance-enhancing approaches, it is interesting to see how behavioral techniques such as “visualization” have a psychoanalytic underpinning. For example, in visualization one normally imagines oneself playing or running in an idealized way. This is a way of putting the player in touch with various positive internalized objects. As that connection is strengthened through repetition, the connection with a positive internal world, mentors and parents, is strengthened.
The life that professional athletes live is quite abnormal compared to the ordinary life that most of us are familiar with. For example, the pattern of their earning capacity is upside down. Ordinarily, we begin a career and gradually gain skills, and then financial rewards increase in proportion over the years. This allows time to understand how to handle one's finances and the pressures of dealing with financial decisions. In contrast, the young athlete often comes into a great deal of money right at the beginning, before maturity is developed to deal with it. In addition, the sense of omnipotence and narcissistic gratification that many of these young men have experienced throughout their careers has a tendency to lead them into mistakes of excess, in terms of poor judgment, and compulsive and sometimes violent behavior. The normal checks and balances on behavior for many of them have not been present. They have been coddled, nurtured, and encouraged, but often not disciplined. The discussions emphasize the importance of internal discipline in ensuring a long career.
The stresses on relationships are also abnormal. These young men spend a great deal of time traveling in strange cities, often subject to blandishments from various con men and admiring women. It is interesting to hear the anguish with which these young men speak of how one can determine whether the interest that a woman might have for them is genuine or hero worship. The importance of maintaining a primary relationship with a wife or a girlfriend, and the utilization of that stability in enhancing ultimate success in sport, is a frequent topic.
The small groups often become solid bonding experiences for these young men. Similarly, solid relationships often develop between the rookies and the veteran players and psychiatrists. They become accustomed to talking to psychotherapists and begin to understand the value of the use of psychological techniques as well as psychotherapy in their sport and in their lives. They learn that action is not always the answer. At the end, I give them my card and also articles I have written on the psychological effects of spor ts injuries. It is fascinating to follow the careers of these young men as they develop into veteran players, and to see how issues first discussed in the group often blossom as they mature.
I have been interviewed many times by the media for psychoanalytic aspects of sports issues. For example, two players were competing several years ago for the home run title. In particular, they were seeking to break the legendary Babe Ruth's record for total home runs in a season, which had stood for many years at 60. I was asked by a reporter whether I thought it was very difficult for these two men to be competing with each other so closely. I explained that, on the contrary, it was much easier for them to compete with each other and to have each other to focus on, because it was easier to compete in a sibling relationship than it was to compete with a legendary and giant father, as with the figure of Babe Ruth.
Psychoanalytic consultation in sports is not only interesting and enjoyable, but it presents psychoanalysis in a positive and modern light. So often psychoanalysis has an image of being something antiquated, something that takes place only on the couch and in the consulting room. For people to see psychoanalytic principles in action, operating and valued by famous and talented people, presents psychoanalysis as the vibrant force of life that it really is.