What does it mean to psychoanalyse sport? Reflections from the field
This article explores the question: what does it mean to psychoanalyse sport? Bringing together eighteen contributors working across sport and psychoanalysis, it offers a series of theoretical provocations that position sport as a privileged site for the expression, formation, and negotiation of unconscious life. Rather than treating sport as a domain of performance, spectacle, or statistics, it is approached as a space where desire, loss, aggression, fantasy, and ambivalence are enacted and shaped. Several key themes are identified and discussed, including the uncovering of sport’s unconscious dynamics, its constitutive contradictions, its staging of psychic limits and lack, its function as a cultural framework, the bonds of fandom and intimacy, its challenge to traditional sport psychology, and its potential to reframe the epistemological assumptions underpinning sport. Taken together, these themes develop an understanding of sport as a space saturated with unconscious meaning, indeed, a space not to be decoded or resolved but to be attended to in its opacity and excess. In doing so, the article opens up new critical possibilities for thinking about sport as a cultural phenomenon in which psychic and social life are inextricably entangled.
Authors
- Benny Thomas
- Sandra Meeuwsen
- Miguel Eduardo Alva Rivera (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2826-7308)
- Rayyan Dabbous (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7605-9469)
- Karen Tocatly (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0004-6406-4481)
- Lee Shapiro
- Stacy Thompson (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0373-3974)
- Robert Geal (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9059-0256)
- Jack Black (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1595-5083)
- Bonnie Pang
- Joseph S. Reynoso (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0831-9185)
- Zane Dodd
- Klaudia Wittmann (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0003-5230-2748)
- B. A. Bernstein
- Steve Tuber
- Patrick F. Scanlon
- David G. Cushman
- Shani Samai-Moskovich
Institutions
- University of Wolverhampton (GB)
- Tufts University (US)
- University of Wisconsin–Eau Claire (US)
- City College of New York (US)
- Wested (US)
- City University of New York (US)
- University of Toronto (CA)
- Silverton Hospital (US)
- New York Psychoanalytic Society and Institute (US)
- University of Florida (US)
- Psychoanalytical Association (KZ)
- City College (US)
- Glanrhyd Hospital (GB)
- National Postdoctoral Association (US)
- IS practice (BE)
- Chrysalis BioTherapeutics (United States) (US)
- University of Bath (GB)
- Institut National du Sport, de l'Expertise et de la Performance (FR)
- Tel Hai Academic College (IL)
- Sheffield Hallam University (GB)
- Coventry University (GB)
Publication Details
- Journal
- Cogent Social Sciences
- Published
- 2025-09-26
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1080/23311886.2025.2562379
- Primary Topic
- Doping in Sports
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 0.00