About 15 years ago, I began to learn about the practice of sport psychology. I had long been interested in how deeply sports mattered to many people—family, friends, and patients. I had always felt great pleasure in the feeling of running or swimming, dribbling, passing and shooting a basketball, or making the swing that sent a golf ball right to a target. Reaching middle age, slowing down a bit and looking ahead, I was more than casually interested in how it goes when images of oneself as an athlete are discrepant with performance. My identification with my father surely played a role. He had been an intensely competitive and successful athlete who had a serious injury at about the same age. Back then, when I was in college, I did not have to be a psychoanalyst to see that the threat to his athletic pursuits was a crisis for a man so defined by his image as an athlete.
I was interested in the feeling of doing sports and ways that the experience common to average children and adults was like or unlike those of elite athletes. I began with particular attention to youth sports and the role of sports in development. I offered pro bono services to coaches and teams in the Boston area, learning from them as I offered them my perspectives. Consulting with educators and youth sports organizations, I have contributed to programs that aim to foster healthier development and broader, more sustained participation in sports.
Sometimes my work with an athlete or a team takes me out to a gym or playing field. Or, in a meeting at my office with individual athletes, we work to boost performance with practiced mental skills, to overcome anxiety and inhibition, or to cope with injury. Not infrequently, these individual consultations lead to psychoanalytic therapies, as well, both short and long term. While I have spent time working with all kinds of athletes, from young children to seniors, from average recreational athletes to pros and world champions, I most often see talented adolescents, many of whom have considerable success and big ambitions. Their aims and energies can lead to great accomplishment and strong pleasures, but they may also engender strong conflict, internal and interpersonal. Often their stories illustrate paradigms that are central to the issues at every other stage of development.
If being an athlete touches such a strong chord of the experience of self, it is easy to see why narcissistic challenges can adhere so deeply to one's striving in sport.
It was midway through the Dragons' basketball season. The team was ahead, but they put away the game when Danny, the team's star forward, pulled down a rebound, bolted down the floor, soared beyond two defenders, and jammed the ball through the hoop. The crowd exploded.
No one was more excited than Coach Jones. I knew he was intensely involved with this player, having talked with both of them earlier in the season. Danny had put himself and his team at risk, losing his temper and drawing technical fouls in two games. A third technical would end his season. He had to contain himself, but this was not easy. He proudly told me how he felt and likened his unfettered expressiveness to the assertiveness of his physical play. Could he contain his reaction to frustrations in the course of the game without losing the capacity to be loose and free in his play? He worried that the fire was already going out of his game.
Coach Jones worked well with all his athletes, but he particularly admired a passionate kid like Danny. This coach played with similar intensity in high school and college. We both knew he had struggled with similar conflicts.
The words “transference” and “counter-transference” were never used, but they were part of the consultation, as I helped this young player and his coach manage conflicts within themselves and with each other. The coach knew they were at a critical juncture with both opportunities and dangers. He was angry with Danny and felt he should not be. Knowing that I understood his commitment to the boys as players and as people, privately he could safely vent his frustrations regarding Danny. He could also remind himself, as he told me, of his understanding of what was at stake for Danny, knowing his family background. Talking it through, separately and together, both the boy and the man could see both sides of the conflict, acknowledge the tension, and move forward.
Refracted through the separate perspectives appropriate to their different stages of development, the passion that Danny and his coach felt fueled ambition as well as conflict. In adolescence, the personal meaning of athletic striving is consolidated in a way likely to persist through life, but the core motivation toward athletic pursuit is rooted in the earliest phases of development.
Psychoanalytic perspectives on the body trace back to the beginning of our field, but attention to the muscular use of the body as it
Howard M. Katz, M.D., is president of and training and supervising analyst at Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, on the faculty of Harvard Medical School at McLean Hospital, and consults with athletes and coaches at New England Sport Psychiatry.
contributes to identity and self-structure has been limited. Child observation and neurobiological studies suggest the significant degree to which the driving force of early development is grounded in physical activity. Moving, perceiving, and remembering are unified activities in early development. The baby, at the onset of life, needs to map the world. In the service of that need, the baby is supplied with an urge to explore the world physically and to expand that exploration continuously as development proceeds. The first bases of self-feeling emerge as the child combines kinesthetic, tactile, visual, and olfactory sensations with motor activity and recognition memory in an early form of synthesizing, integrative ego functioning. Those action patterns of early childhood are intrinsic elements of the child's seeking connection, sustenance, and affective experience in relation to others. In time, these physical templates can form the basis for corporeal metaphors for affectively charged experiences of self in relation to others.
In a sense, then, every baby is an athlete, expanding and refining the repertoire of motor capability in a way that is intimately intertwined with his or her growing sense of self in the world of inanimate and living objects. The continuing resonance of this early experience is the most basic underpinning of the widespread continued interest in athletic quests throughout life, both as we ourselves run, jump, throw, and catch, and as we admire and applaud accomplished heroes of elite and professional sports. It is also the seed from which grows an unfolding element of identity as “an athlete,” which many young people develop in childhood and adolescence. For some, that identity element remains central all the way through life.
If being an athlete touches such a strong chord of the experience of self, it is easy to see why narcissistic challenges can adhere so deeply to one's striving in sport. Of the athletes I have seen, more than a few feel the weight of pressure they or those around them put on competitive success in some sport. Often, great fragility lies just beneath a shiny veneer of confidence.
Adolescent conflicts over ambition are likely to stimulate or re-awaken conflicts in parents. The parents' images of success and failure may be very particular and overlap with those of the child, as in a pressured young man I saw, whose parents had both been champions in his sport, as had been the maternal grandfather. Or the issues may be experienced more generally, as when a family's broad concerns about status and wishes to be special are played out in relation to a child identified as a prodigy, as “something special.”
The social construct of sport in today's world contributes to the challenge faced by young athletes. Contemporary sports culture emphasizes a star system and pushes for super-specialization. Children are now guided into specialized programs for one sport or another at ever-earlier ages, with an idea that to succeed in today's competitive world you have to make your choice early and make an all-out commitment. Often, this gives less room for the child's experimentation and open creative play. The workmanlike attitude I see in some children may lead to enhanced skill development, but I see also a lot of confusion in the self-sense of some of the children who become monomaniacal about achievement in sport. Furthermore, when a child with excellent athletic ability is even modestly challenged in other areas, for example by a learning disability or attention deficit, the child and family may imagine athletic success is the singular ticket to an intangible feeling of accomplishment or more tangible rewards like college admission or financial support.
Sometimes when conflicts in young athletes are particularly sharp and disavowed, they become manifest in action. This can be played out in ways that turn the athlete away from the sport, like rejecting coaching or the demands of training, getting involved with substance abuse or dropping out of sports. On the other hand, some may act out through over-training, inviting injury. In some more troubled young athletes, more general social isolation and body dysmorphic problems may arise.
Both in consultation work with coaches, teams, and organizations, and in the setting of interventions and therapies with athletic individuals, I am impressed that the positive forces that are so compelling about sport can usually be harnessed in the interest of handling inevitable pressures and conflicts. That engagement with a powerfully motivating and gratifying pursuit is one of the reasons that sport psychology consultation to me is a particularly enjoyable area of applied psychoanalysis.