Sport and Psychoanalysis: What Sport Reveals about Our Unconscious Desires, Fantasies, and Fears explores the intersection of sport and psychoanalysis, emphasizing the often-overlooked psycho-social dimensions underpinning the experience of sport. By challenging the idea that sport offers an "escape" from reality--a realm separate to the politics of everyday life--each chapter critically considers the unconscious desires, fantasies, and fears that underpin the sporting spectacle for both participants and spectators. Indeed, beyond simply applying psychoanalysis to sport, this book proposes how sport can be used to pose questions to psychoanalysis, thus using sport as a medium to elucidate key psychoanalytic ideas and concepts. This volume addresses a diverse range of theorists, including Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Lou Andreas-Salome?, Norman O. Brown, and Frantz Fanon, and applies them across a variety of topics and sports, including NFL coaching, Manny Pacquiao, play, football, basketball, baseball, poker, and the 2023 FIFA Women's World Cup, therefore providing a unique understanding of the cultural, social, and psychic significance of sports. A timely and relevant collection, this book will appeal to scholars and practitioners interested in understanding sport from both the cultural and clinical application of psychoanalytic theory as well as academics and practitioners in sport studies, psychology, sociology, education, and cultural studies.
Jack Black is associate professor of culture, media, and sport at Sheffield Hallam University. Joseph S. Reynoso is a psychoanalytic clinical psychologist in New York City.
Few arenas of contemporary life excite such strong emotion in contests of such ostensibly low stakes as sports. Why do we care so much about games--particularly games played by others we will never meet and with whom we may have little in common? Sport and Psychoanalysis takes a critical perspective on a corner of human life that is, in many ways, deeply irrational, but which, despite this fact, is nevertheless extraordinarily meaningful and important. --Erin C. Tarver, author of The I in Team: Sports Fandom and the Reproduction of Identity In a world which preaches the virtue of work, work, work, it is only when we let ourselves play that we can truly glimpse the intricacy of the human psyche. Let this collection of psychoanalysts be your guide to the grace and disgrace of the world of athleticism. --Jamieson Webster, author of Disorganisation & Sex Jack Black and Joseph S. Reynoso have put together Sport and Psychoanalysis: What Sport Reveals about Our Unconscious Desires, Fantasies, and Fears, which will mark an epochal moment in the understanding of sport in relation to society. No longer will one be able to dismiss the social and existential significance of sport, thanks to this timely collection. Each essay provides a penetrating analysis of sport's varying aspects as well as how they function psychically for participants and spectators. This is, simply put, a masterwork not to be missed. --Todd McGowan, author of Enjoying Alienation Sport, it is commonly held, can drive us mad. Sport has the power to derail the routine of our daily lives; it can upturn the normality of our everyday exchanges; it can make us aliens to ourselves. And it does all this seldom, it must be said, in a good way. In Jack Black and Joseph Reynoso's collection of essays, we may have found the reason--or, the unreason, should you so prefer--for this particular brand of madness. It is a clinical condition. Certifiably so. Such is the nature of Sport and Psychoanalysis that I suspect many a sports-mad personage will now claim that their (anti-) social irremediability is less a madness than a condition underwritten by towering figures in clinical psychology. Who ever knew that Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan had it in their clinical arsenal to perform such a rescue act? --Grant Farred, author of The Perversion of Gratitude: An Apartheid Education We emphasize--and over emphasize--sports so much in our society, it is bracing when you read about it from a perspective that contains the shock of the new. Sport and Psychoanalysis does exactly that. In the hands of Jack Black and Joseph Reynoso, we get a different perspective on sports that I certainly have never read. What is particularly exciting is that this is not only about how psychoanalysis gives us new insight into sports. It is about how the games we play give us new insight into psychoanalysis. --Dave Zirin, sports editor of The Nation, author of What's My Name, Fool? Sports and Resistance in the United States
