Gunn Engelsrud1 & Birgit Nordtug2
1 Western Norway University of Applied Sciences; 2 University of Inland Norway
This article is intended to develop knowledge about the relationship between athletes and sports psychologists. The theme has been extensively researched in the sport psychology and coaching literature in sport. However, there is limited knowledge about the understanding of how these relationships are played out and understood in the specific relationships between athletes and sports psychologists. In this article, the authors use the practice of well-known sport psychologist Britt Tajet-Foxell to elaborate on and theorize about how relationships become sources of embodied and verbalized knowing. As research material they chose a sample of media texts portraying collaboration between Tajet-Foxell and the Norwegian cross-country skier and the highly decorated winter Olympian, Marit Bjørgen. The selected media texts were analyzed to highlight the knowledge created in the dialectic relationship between the sport psychologist and the athlete. The authors use a phenomenological approach to interpret and analyse this relationship, along with psychoanalytical ideas that situate the challenge being examined in the context of the athlete’s gendered socialisation history. The combination of these perspectives provides a way of understanding the currently underexplored values expressed in Tajet-Foxell’s practice, and the more general challenges involved in human encounters between athletes and sports psychologists, and beyond.
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GUNN ENGELSRUD is a professor at Western University of Applied Sciences (HVL), Norway and a member of the Faculty for Education, Arts and Sport at the Institute for Sport, Nutrition and Sciences. She has a PhD in pedagogy from the University of Oslo from 1991. Her professional field of competence is within pedagogy, learning and teaching in higher education, phenomenology and qualitative research. Her current research interest focus on phenomenological studies of PE and aspects of learning, meaning making and communication. She is an experienced teacher and supervisor for students (MA, PhD) within Health Sciences, Physical Education, Dance- and Movement studies and Studies in Higher Education. Email: gunn.helene.engelsrud@hvl.no
BIRGIT NORDTUG is a professor of psychology at the University of Inland Norway. Her areas of interest are French psychoanalysis (with a touch of French phenomenology), semiotics, psychological fundamental problems (especially related to subjectivity, body, and language) and applied epistemology. Her professional field of competence is theory work related to research on eating disordered and the power structure that the subjects are defined by. She combines experience from professional knowledge based on clinical encounters with analyses and institutional regulations and structures. Email: birgit.nordtug@inn.no
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