All My Children

The runner who times himself or tries to increase his distance and speed, while consciously exercising for his health, is subconsciously trying to prove himself to himself, and unconsciously trying to prove his worthiness to his parents or whoever has taken their place in his unconscious. With good reason the first great athletic competitions were religious festivals, or were intrinsically connected with them. The Olympic games at their inception in classical Greece were not designed to encourage healthy exercise or to test athletes’ prowess in meeting reality challenges. Transcending these considerations was the fact that the games were a religious ceremony in honor, of the Olympian gods who lent their abode’s name to the competition. An athlete brought himself to the punishing rigors of Olympic competition out of a sense that his participation served religious, magical ends. The gods took a special interest in the man who won in fair competition; or, depending on how one reads Pindar’s Olympian Odes, the gods revealed which men they took a special interest in by permitting them to win. In either case, the victor’s laurel wreath was a symbol of far more than victory in an athletic contest.

Although sports have now become secularized, they have not lost their important “magical” dimensions of serving unspoken unconscious needs. There is reason why the modern Olympics stress their connection with the religious games of ancient Greece in which the gods‘ choice of the winners indicated the people and city they favored above all others. Today we no longer live in city-states, but all this has been extended to the nations. The athletes in our Olympic contests compete not only as individuals but also as national representatives. Individual victories are celebrated by raising the flag of the winner’s country, which in this way seems to demonstrate its superiority to others. It is obviously a symbolic superiority, but it suggests that we have not moved all that far away from feeling (and perhaps thinking) that winning in these competitions has a meaning far beyond what happens in reality, and that it shows some nations superior or favored over others for whatever reasons. All international competitions seem to take on such meaning, as illustrated by the world chess championships, which have now become widely viewed as events having political relevance.

Given that adults assign such far-reaching symbolic significance to, the winning of competitive games, how could it be otherwise for children, who are even more ready to see magical meaning and connotations in nearly everything? Psychoanalytic examination of the meaning of sport competitions has shown that in many cases, people use them for externalizing inner conflicts. By projecting such conflicts onto the game, one need no longer repress them or feel torn by them, but can act out these feelings more or less directly either as participant or vicariously as spectator. The danger threatening from within—inner conflicts—is displaced onto the outside world through the game; neurotic anxiety is converted into conscious anxiety about defeat in a game and is thus easier to accept and to live with.

That we are dealing here with unconscious conflicts is demonstrated by the degree of tension and excitement that sports events produce in participant and spectator alike, and by their intense personal involvement in what is supposedly just a game. Witness, for example, the acute excitement generated in spectators who often cannot even clearly see what is going on because of the immensity of the arena. Witness too the pride of persons who don’t even care about sports whenever the local or national team wins, and their fury and dejection if it loses, and the violence that sometimes erupts at the end of a hotly contested game. And what of the millions who spend their Sundays watching ball games and other contests on television? Their devotion is but another indication that much more is at stake unconsciously in such games than a contest to determine which team is better.

The child who plays Hide and Seek is experimenting with vital issues such as: “Is it safe for me to leave home?” “Will I be able to return to the security of home if I leave?” The parallel problem of the adolescent is to free himself from parental dominance, to prove his mettle and his chance of success with his peers in the wider world. As he tries to achieve the first he often attacks what his home stands for, whereas to succeed in the latter he still needs its safety; thus he is deeply ambivalent about home and parents. While the adolescent no longer plays Hide and Seek, or only rarely, he does avidly play ball games. In many of these, for example in soccer, the issue is to attack and invade the other team’s home base or goal by means of a ball, and to defend your own territory against such danger at all costs.

Aggression and the defense against it are what soccer is all about; but in particular, it is about the attack and defense of the home base. Only one player—the goalkeeper—stays within this home base, and special rules of conduct apply to him only. As the one who is in the home and who must directly defend it, he may symbolize the father or the parents. All the other players, both attackers and defenders, must remain out in the field, outside the home area. The teams are like two groups of brothers—their number limited to how many siblings one may have in reality—who no longer reside within the home. Like adolescents in real life, they attack the home base and the father (of the other team) and simultaneously defend their own. So in the game they can have it both ways, as the adolescent so often wishes he could in reality: to attack, and to defend, a home and a symbolic father.

The winning players gain public applause and approbation both for their attack and their defense, which assures them that it is all right to discharge some of their aggression within set bounds. Winning enhances their self- esteem, something adolescents need even more than other age groups. While it seems doubtful that the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton, there is good reason to assume that the eternal battle of the adolescent of all times and places is symbolically acted out on all kinds of playing fields.

We attach many psychological or symbolic meanings to our teams, irrespective of whether we are players or spectators, and these are the source of much of the game’s interest for us. For example, there are a number of successful athletes who suddenly lose interest in competing, although they continue to enjoy their sport. When these cases are investigated psychoanalytically, an interesting pattern emerges. The athlete seems to have cherished a magical belief that winning would prove something about him or predict what would happen in his future (but not in terms of the realistic consequences of winning or losing). When he loses this belief, he loses a powerful motive for exposing himself to the rigors and dangers of competition. One of the most common of these magical beliefs has to do with the indestructibility of the body; the wish to believe in it and to prove it through repeated testing accounts for many deeds of athletic daring. When such irrational motives are gone, neither the acclaim of the crowd nor financial rewards are compelling enough reason to continue competing.

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