Free-to-Access issues:

AUGUST: Just a Game? Sport and Psychoanalytic Theory

Jack Black, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Culture, Media, and Sport, Sheffield Hallam University, j.black@shu.ac.uk

Joseph S. Reynoso, Ph.D., National Basketball Players Association Mental Health and Wellness Provider, drjsreynoso@gmail.com

Summary:
With its unquestionable massive global monetary and cultural appeal, this special issue introduces, explores, and outlines the psychoanalytic importance of sport’s peculiarity. In doing so, it highlights how psychoanalysis allows us to reflect critically on the purpose and meaning of sport, giving psychoanalysis a valuable role in understanding how sport and society influence and shape the individual, and vice versa. Here, sport enables us to explore the fascinating intersections of the unconscious at work as well as unlocking the potential for a rich theoretical examination of sport’s social, cultural, and political importance through the lens of psychoanalytic theory. Using sport as a medium to explicate psychoanalytic ideas in order to dialectically think sport and psychoanalysis together, it is contested that rather than simply applying psychoanalysis to sport, sport may ask questions of psychoanalysis as well.

Original Articles

  1. “Just a Game? Sport and Psychoanalytic Theory” by Jack Black and Joseph S. Reynoso
  2. “When did we forget we were playing? Failure, play, and possibility in sport & clinical life” by Molly Merson
  3. “Being and timeouts: live sports in the psyche” by Ryan Engley
  4. “‘What occurs in our times when the analysts speak of transference’: Identification, jouissance, and race in NBA fan culture” by Miguel Rivera
  5. “Death, jouissance and the bodybuilder” by Will Greenshields
  6. “A psychoanalytic understanding of eating disorders in athletes: defensive and facilitative potentials” by Zane Dodd and Elissa “Liz” Woodruff
  7. “The woman is perfected: A psychoanalytic reading of systemic abuse in women’s artistic gymnastics” by Klaudia Wittmann
  8. “Ideological fan-tasy: desire and drive in football fanship representations in contemporary Argentine cinema” by Andre ́s Nicola ́s Rabinovich

Counterspace

  1. “Football and fetishism” by Robert Geal
  2. “Drive beyond body: the undead jouissance of endurance sports” by Cameron More
  3. “Why do we act like fans? What would Winnicott say about it?” by Steve Tuber and Karen Tocatly
  4. "The Interpassivity of Pick-up Soccer” by Stacy Thompson
  5. “Abjection in sports: An ethical approach” by Kutte Jonsson