Tag: “Sport and Psychoanalysis”

The World Cup offers a rich site for psychoanalytic inquiry. Whether in relation to nationalism, fandom, desire, identification, embodiment, spectacle, media, race, gender, inequality, anxiety, enjoyment, failure, or collective belonging, the tournament continues to generate profound emotional investment across players, fans, nations, and media institutions. This provides an important opportunity to think critically about why sport matters, and why football, in particular, continues to occupy such a powerful place in our social and subjective lives.

Psychoanalysis, with its attention to unconscious desire, psychic conflict, and the role of fantasy, provides a unique lens through which to interrogate the presence and function of aggression in sporting life. This special issue will advance psychoanalytic investigations of aggression in sport by bringing together interdisciplinary scholarship across clinical theory, cultural analysis, and critical sport studies. In doing so, it seeks to explore the psychic, social, and symbolic dimensions of aggression as they relate to athletes, spectators, institutions, and the media.

At first glance, Sport and Psychoanalysis may appear worlds apart: sport is associated with physicality, competition, and entertainment, while psychoanalysis explores the unconscious, desire, and the contradictions that structure subjectivity. Yet, it is precisely this apparent disparity that makes their relationship so compelling. By engaging with the psychic, cultural, and social dimensions of sport, the journal offers a critical space for examining how sport both reflects and unsettles the psychic and social structures that shape our lives.