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Aetiology of phenomenon of fair play in sport through psychoanalytic discourse
Roman Vodeb
Full text (pdf) | Views: 25 | Written in Slovene. | Published: December 7, 2003
Abstract: When discussing fair play, sports experts nowadays mostly talk about how to "be a sport" on a sport field. It means telling and preaching to athletes to obey all the written rules of sport's ethic and those not written as well. Here we want to explore the other meaning of the term "fair play". We want to really learn about it, because fair play certainly is a psychological category. Psychoanalytic logic teaches us that roots of fair play should be sought in the infantile period of child's development. It seems, that the events caused by the Oedipus complex and the building Superego have the most sufficient impact on someone's sports behavior. Theoretically speaking, fair play cannot be considered as something gained from culture - it is mainly a construct, a symptom of returning infantile repressions in the context of father as a sexual concurrent. "Turning to the opposite side" (reaction-formation) is an ego-defense mechanism that in the etiology of fair play ought to be pointed out in particularly. As we are talking about men in sports, let us tell, it is the boy's relation towards his father at the time when he's arrogating the boy's mother to himself, the most crucial for feeling and performing fair play. Fantasies and repressions, which happened in the psychical reality of a child, have the main impact on fair play in sports as well as in other situations.
Keywords: psychoanalysis, sports, fair play, Oedipus complex, defense mechanisms
