Roman Vodeb, Independent Scholar, Slovenia
Abstract
The
paradigm of the goal constitutes one of the fundamental libidinal paradigms in
the psychoanalytic conceptualization of ball games. Moreover, the concept of
the goal reveals that the latent structure of sports games lies on libidinal
foundations. Typical libidinal categories hiding beyond sports are: the Oedipus complex, castration, the
repressed, unconscious desire, pleasure etc. A historical analysis of certain ball
games shows that the paradigm of the goal in the structure of sports has not
been transferred from one country to another or from one continent to another.
It is only the libidinal disposition found in any heterosexually-structured
male mind that is the essential disposition which brought to life the universal
ball-sports paradigm in different places and time periods. The goal as a
paradigm stems from an unconscious desire to have coitus with a female. Secondary elaboration, a concept taken
from Freud’s interpretation of dreams, generates a diversity of supporting
elements that constitute the rules of the game. It is due to the very secondary elaboration that the libidinal
symbolic game becomes “playable”.
(Tim Vodeb - throwing ball from out over 50 m, World record)
The
following presentation stems from a complex psychoanalytic historical
interpretation of ball sports, football, ie. association football and American
football, in particular, as well as handball, hockey, water polo, rugby and
basketball. A comprehensive theoretical treatment was given in the book
entitled “Sport through Psychoanalysis” (Vodeb
2001) and some papers published over the last decade, culminating in the “Interpretation of Sports” (Vodeb 2005).
A
classic introduction into football should begin with the phrase, "Football is the most important
trifling matter in the world." It should have become clear by now that
this contribution transcends classic discourse in that it leans heavily on
meta-psychology, if not directly on philosophy, with the theoretical epicenter focused
on the goal, viz. the goal in football or basketball or the touchdown in American football and
rugby.
Little
is known about sports or competitive games of the ancient times. Obviously, we
were not there to witness what set the ball rolling, literally, what triggered
the development of football or the concept of the goal as an area where something had to be put in, that something having the function of the
modern-day ball. There is no time machine that would take us back in time to
investigate the origin of the concept of the goal as the primary paradigm of
ball games. The unreliability of various historical records and oral accounts
makes us take a different approach towards the study of (pre)history in
general, not merely the history of ball games or sports. Interpretation of
historical events and (folklore) rituals can be safely based on an assumption
that the human mind of both the present and the past followed the same
algorithms. And if there is any science that contains any kind of knowledge
about the human mind, it is definitely psychology or, to be more precise,
Freud's psychoanalysis.
In
spite of the untenability of this meta-science, both psychiatry and clinical
psychology, which endeavor to cope with the human mind or mental pathos, go on
employing the very starting points as established by Freud, the father of
psychoanalysis, over a hundred years ago. He always claimed, in his Totem and Taboo (Freud 1979) in
particular, that the mind of prehistoric people was exactly the same as is
today, although the level of psychosis of primitive men was considerably
higher. But even then, human beings were determined by their libidinal
structure, which means that even then they were directed by the (unconscious) desire to experience satisfaction
or pleasure. Needless to say that
such pleasure was sexual. As soon as
primitive man made his life secure, he (unconsciously) began to think how to
make it pleasurable, too. Coital
orgasm as the culmination of pleasure was the ("Id’s") imperative that secured the phylogenetic way of
the human kind.
You
may be wondering what on earth this has got to do with the goal as the primary
paradigm in sports games? It is common knowledge that a goal is not only a goal, yet the theoretical apparatus supporting
the idea of the latent sports structure
is so untenable that it can be (legitimately) debunked by anyone, as cognitive skepticism can be always
employed. However, this does not mean that the theory of the latent sports structure is not valid,
especially if we choose to dissect sport by means of psychoanalysis. There can
be, naturally, various nuances to the theory that sport is a derivative of libido and that it has an unconscious latent sexual structure. As
Freud developed a theory about the innate bisexual nature of humanity, any
(pan)sexual theory may be legitimate enough - and there must have been quite a
few such theories even in Freud's time. A first “wild” generalization might be
that sport, e.g. football, either association football or American football,
has a latent homosexual structure. There is no end to such theories. One of the
latest was developed by Californian folklorist Alan Dundes at Berkeley University,
who interprets American football as a latent homosexual ritual (Dundes 1979,
1997). And Dundes was no pioneer in the field of psychoanalytic interpretation
of (American) football and rugby or sports in general. As early as the
beginning of the 20th century, George T. W. Patrick (Patrick 1903) tried to
provide a psychological explanation of the fascinating character of sports
games, of American football in particular. Patrick's attempt at interpreting sports
games included the seeds of then born psychoanalysis. But it took another two
decades before Abraham A. Brill, who had just been translating Freud into English,
wrote The Way of Fun (Brill1929).
This psychoanalytic interpretation served Thomas Hornsby Ferril as a basis for
his parody essay Freud and Football,
which he wrote in 1955 and published under the pseudonym of Childe Herald ten
years later, when it was met with a wide response. The paper presents the Oedipus complex as an essential momentum
in American football and sports in general. Nevertheless, we should bear in
mind that Hornsby Ferril was more of an essayist and a journalist than a
genuine psychoanalyst (Herald 1965: 250-252). Adrian Stokes chose a more
serious approach by setting his focus on all ball games, especially cricket.
Stokes was rather explicit in connecting the Oedipus complex to association football (Stokes 1956). We find
Stokes especially relevant because he was a renowned psychoanalyst and made a
clear connection between the paradigm of the goal and the female genitals, ie.
the archetypal vagina (ibid: 190). In
his theories, he swings between the theses that balls, especially in cricket
and baseball, symbolize semen and that the ball represents the phallus, e.g. in football (ibid: 187). During that time, some
"wild" and lay interpretations supported the thesis that the (round)
football might symbolize the male testicles (Dundes 1979: 79). In the American
gay lexicon from 1972, the idiom "to ball someone" means copulation
(Rodgers 1972: 27). While probing the symbolic meaning of the ball and
attempting to define the role of the mother and the father in ball games
containing the paradigm of the goal, Dundes drifts into cognitive skepticism, the attitude that, eventually, any
psychoanalyst is faced with (Dundes 1979: 79-80). In his folklorist theories,
Dundes flirts with the idea of anal copulation, presenting American football as
having a latent homosexual structure. Nevertheless, Dundes also uses
heterosexual terms, e.g. when relating the touchdown
to erogenous zones (ibid).
Our
theoretical treatment does not support the above thesis, as the thesis of
heterosexual (pan)sexualism entirely satisfies us in terms of interpretation.
Psychoanalysts, however, have been puzzled by genetic research. Geneticists
have recently raised their voices to deny the basic psychoanalytic thesis of
the bisexual nature of human beings, thus turning many psychoanalytic theories,
including that of Freud, upside down or sending them back to square one. The
most remarkable opposition to Freud's and Fliss's theories on the bisexual
nature of human beings can be illustrated by the life of a Canadian called
David aka Bruce, who was born as a boy and whose penis was accidentally cut off
during a routine circumcision. Dr. John Money - a sexologist and psychiatrist at
The Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, who had learned his "trade"
at one of the North American universities, no doubt including clinical
experience which was based on Freud's psychoanalytic findings and theories (he
published the last of his ten books in his late 70’s in 2003) - advised the
parents to let the doctors completely remove David's penis and construct a
vagina, and then raise him as a girl named Brenda (Money 1973, 1980). Brenda,
however, failed to grow up into a woman, despite being treated with various
hormones and psychotherapy. Instead, she became a lesbian and eventually had
her gender changed again, becoming a man named David. David was happily married
but committed suicide in the spring of 2004. This sad story would not have been
so interesting if David, alias Bruce or Brenda, had not had a twin brother,
Brian, through whom he, while still living as Brenda, finally found out that he
had been born as a boy and that his female gender had been imposed on him owing
to a twist of fate. In his mind, David never accepted the imposed female
gender. This story should raise doubts with psychiatrists and clinical
psychologists who cling to the theory of the bisexual origin of the human mind.
John Money brought the idea into play (Money 1994, 1998, 2002), and his actions
call psychoanalytic theorists to revise a number of Freud's theses and Freudian
ideas. Nevertheless, let us bear in mind that numerous of Freud's theories will
still hold water, although they cannot be proven like an axiom in physics. Even
though the psychic gender may be genetically determined, this does not affect
the consistency of our psychoanalytic interpretation of sports. It may be,
however, expanded as follows: it is well possible that the unconscious (sexual)
desire is not determined only by “upbringing”, ie. through primary
identification, or the anatomy of genitals, but also by the genetic disposition
for a mental desire that may be based on the coital impulse or instinct.
Notwithstanding,
we may still legitimately state that a
goal is not a goal, but rather a substitute for the female genitals. The
goal was unconsciously invented or “desired into being” by the males as a
result of their (hetero)sexual, coital dispositions or instinctive impulses. Ball
games are older than recorded history. According to the preserved documents, it
may be concluded that they were known to almost all ancient societies: Egypt, Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome, even in China and Australia. The Incas, too, were no
exception. As early as 4000 years ago, the Egyptians used to play games with
leather balls stuffed with straw and raveled reeds. They may have even employed
inflated pig or ox bladders, as were used by the Ancient Greeks. The Chinese
started to use bird feathers as late as the 3rd century. They probably played
the game throwing a small ball into each other's lap or into each other's
hands, or kicking it. Naturally, we do not know whether they used a goal and in
what form, but we may assume the plausibility of the hypothesis. Neither can we
tell whether Egyptian "handball" and "football" were played
according to some rules. Psychoanalysis allows us to deduce that the rules of
the game were formed in accordance with secondary
elaboration, a notion known from Freud’s interpretation of dreams. Secondary elaboration (processing or reprocessing) is an
unconscious cognitive mechanism that Freud introduced in his interpretation of
dreams or dream analysis. It is the secondary
elaboration that makes a certain game “playable”. Playable games must have
been governed by a set of rules familiar to all players, which seems logical
since a game with no rules would have instantly gotten into a fight among the
players. The fact is that any game possesses a symbolic structure and is, basically, a serious matter. It seems
illogical that the Ancient Greeks, for instance, would not have
(self-)restricted their ball games with rules. Historians state that the first
ball games were the boys’ domain. Their favorite was similar to today's Dodge Ball. They are assumed to have
played football as well, or some kind of rugby: the players had to enter a
"forbidden" area drawn on the ground, carrying, throwing or kicking
the ball, while the opposite team tried to prevent this with all their might.
This paradigm can be explained by means of psychoanalysis, merely by employing
the concept of the Oedipus complex
and some of its derivatives, e.g. the prohibition of incest. In order to
understand the symbolic value of the
change or transformation of the "forbidden" area into a specifically
determined and restricted area, ie. the goal, it is necessary to introduce the
concept of the difference in the anatomy
of the genitals, which is responsible for the unconscious desire for coitus with a woman as the successor of the
mother. In so doing, the latent structure of such a game appears considerably
more (hetero)sexual.
Tsu Chu or cuju, an ancient Chinese game played
around the 3rd century, reflected a distinct (hetero)sexual or
(latent) coital paradigm. At the emperor's court, a similar latent sexual game
was played, with two teams striving to get a ball through a small silk-lined
hole, a “goal”. The fact that the players were forbidden to touch the ball with
their hands and were only allowed to use their torsos and legs may be
interpreted as an impact of "something
unconscious": the prohibition of touching something, e.g. with one’s
hands, always harbors some kind of symbolism.
Also, psychoanalytic interpretation supports the idea that “a hole in silk” is latently or symbolically (hetero)sexual. According to Freud, silk is associated
with the female, representing her. The paradigm of prohibition is based on the
prohibition of incest. Clearly, we shall never be able to find out or prove if the
prohibition to play with hands is a consequence of the above-mentioned secondary elaboration affecting the
rules of the game to make it more playable or whether this (paradigmatic)
prohibition reflected some other prohibition, e.g. that of erogenous zones or
some other forbidden objects not being allowed to be touched with hands.
This
paper is not aimed at discussing the fact that in Ancient China court ladies
played a similar game called Eight
Immortals Cross the Sea, with two teams of four players. Such a discussion
would call for the introduction of the concepts of penis envy and imitation of
men, which feminists find rather unpopular, to say the least.
Throughout
the time, in China
and elsewhere, other (“sports”) games would crop up and gain popularity. In the
7th century the game of immortals, the then form of football, was
superseded by polo. As a matter of
interest, this game was similar to many games developed in other cultures or
countries, meaning that identical mental structures were derived from identical
unconscious motives or desires. Different cultural environments have had their
influences on the manifest structure of the game, whereas the latent structure
remains identical everywhere and, according to psychoanalytic interpretation,
it concerns sexuality. A decisive
rule in this context is played by the Superego.
In
so-called “primitive” cultures, where the influence of "civilization"
has not reached the (moral) Superego
in a sufficiently "classic" way in terms of prohibitions, the symbolic or latent structure does not hide the animalism or the “Idism” of it.
For instance, a game called Buzkashi
is still played in Turkmenistan
today. This equestrian game of the Uzbeks, in which the riders randomly fight
against each other over the carcass of a goat, is played virtually without any
rules. In spite of the fact that this game is traditional and exceptionally
popular among the Central-Asian steppe nations, it can be hardly classified as
a sports game, although it possesses the competitiveness of the sports
paradigm. As stated above, the basic paradigm of the game is similar to many
games in other cultures. The Ancient Persians in what today would be Iran had a
"ball" instead of a goat. Even though the Uzbeks and the Turkmen are
not culturally or geographically far from Iran, it is difficult to say that
the one community brought the game or custom to the other. It is true, however,
that some historical records state that Alexander the Great, King of Macedon,
received a polo stick or club as a gift after having conquered Persia.
Just as unverifiable, through cognitive
skepticism, remains the story about the founding father of the Persian
Sassanid Empire, Shah Ardashir, who lived in the 3rd century and
presumably played polo between two "goals", marked off by two rods at
a distance of 8 meters
between them. It is possible that Asian nomads, famous for their horsemanship,
may have become enthusiastic about this equestrian game. From the
psychoanalytic point of view, however, there is greater possibility that their
paradigm feeds on identical and universal mental structures. Therefore, it is
not necessarily true that it was the Asian nomads who brought polo to China thorough Mongolia
and to the Byzantine Empire, where the game
first appeared in the 11th century, as is legitimately concluded by
historians.
Sports
sociologists of today treat polo from somewhat different theoretical positions,
which, however, may be supplemented with those of psychoanalysis. The moment
the underprivileged started to play tennis, the elite indulging in sports “took
refuge" in somewhat more expensive sports, e.g. golf and, naturally, polo.
Keeping a horse or having a polo team is a hefty financial investment that
makes today's polo a sport reserved for the rich, who by playing it wish to
(subconsciously) rise above others or the riff-raff. To rise above others means
“to win a privileged position in the
desire of the object of desire”, or, in other words, “a man enjoys a privileged position in a woman's desire” if he
displays an attribute of “betterness” that raises him above others. Having a
horse, and, even more so, winning a polo match, is a privilege enjoyed by the
elite, which, included in the package, brings the "top prize":
namely, euphoria or pleasure.
Obviously,
not everyone could afford a horse in the past either. The wealthiest polo
players would breed superbly agile horses - "polo ponies". A game
crowned with a victory and victory-related pleasure, which, according to
psychoanalytic interpretation, derives from oedipal-castration
events, made it easy for this strongly (hyper)invested (sports) ritual
strike root in any culture. Within the paradigm of a sports or competitive
game, an attempt to score a goal or actually scoring it with the ensuing
pleasure is the ultimate cherry on top. To conquer an adversary on a latent unconscious (symbolic) level
means to castrate a "sexual
rival" and if the victory is synonymous with “scoring” a goal or an
act of symbolic coitus, it is clear
that the discourse of pleasure in sports has a latent libidinal, ie. sexual, etiology and a symbolic structure.
Within
psychoanalytic discourse, the paradigm of the goal in (sports) games is
considered a universal one, since similarly conceived games can be found all
over the world. The paradigm was set up discretely, which contemporary
historians are highly unlikely to agree with. The classic explanation of
introducing a ritual or a sports game is based on a fixed idea that a traveler
brought a game or a ritual from somewhere and that the imported game simply
"struck root". We do not
believe this cognitive paradigm and introduce a radically different one.
Our theory, our conceptual-mental paradigm, marks an epistemological break in the entire understanding of various sports
games. According to our legitimate opinion
or conviction, the historians have made
a mistake in deduction. Psychoanalysis offers a different interpretation, which can be legitimately believed in, although it cannot
be proven, yet the same goes for theories propounded by historians. There
are numerous arguments - historical arguments - that we may refer to within our
cognitive framework. Namely, even when maritime voyages had not yet led to
discovering unknown territories and games were not transferred from one
continent to another or from one country to another, the sports and competition
paradigm was identical all over the world. This should mean that there must be
some sort of mental disposition for identical game paradigms to enter various
cultures. This indeed is the case since the human mind follows identical
algorithms in all races and cultures. The Oedipus
complex and the phenomenon of castration
are universal; the notion of universality
further applies to the unconscious, the
repression, the principle of pleasure, the symbolic structure of mentality, the
Id imperative (aimed at pleasure) etc. Just as universal is the role of the Superego
and the ensuing prohibition of incest.
It
is now plain to see that we cannot take it for granted that contemporary
football has its roots in Europe, or that
football was invented by the Romans. It is very well true that the Romans may
have indeed “desired into being” a game paradigmatically similar to football,
viz. Harpastum. Yet the real roots
lie in the mental sphere of the male mind. The male has mental dispositions for competitiveness,
which is an inherent feature of (sports) games and underlying the introduction
of the goal as a symbolic substitute
form of the female genitals within the paradigm of (competitive) games. The
radicality or uniqueness of our thesis does not deny the possibility of a birth
situation that, directly or indirectly, can have generated a game similar to
football which should have given rise to the development of modern football.
Yet the understanding of football is substantially improved through the mental
dispositions in the “inventors” or “desirers” (males) rather than by a list of
names or the localization of its pioneers in a particular cultural environment
or country.
The
pioneers of European football were thus not the Romans but rather the
heterosexual males who, owing to their unconscious desire to have coitus with a
woman, constructed a game similar to modern football. It is not significant
whether they lived in Ancient Rome, Greece, Egypt, China, Central America or
anywhere else in the world, but there is no escaping the fact that it was every
single culture or country that generated the paradigm of a (rolling) ball,
which at the moment of the generation of the paradigm of the goal as a symbolic substitute form of the female
genitals acquired a phallic structure (phallus
= a symbolic substitute form of the
male genitals or penis). As long as
the ball merely rolled or was thrown or exchanged between the players, its symbolic representation may as well have
been different. It may have been a symbolic
representation of a beheaded adversary. It is said, for instance, that
sometime in the 12th century the head of a Viking plunderer was used
as a ball on an occasion in England.
The
game would occasionally end in casualties. This can be observed on the basis of
a football-like game described by Peter James and Nick Thorpe in their Ancient Inventions: Wonders of the Past!
Referring to the Codex Magliabechiano,
written sometime around the 15th century, the authors mention the
Olmecs, an Indian tribe from Mesoamerica in the Gulf of Mexico (James and
Thorpe 1994: 560), who inventend or “desired the game into being” around the 10th
century. It is believed that it was later adopted by other regional
tribes, e.g. the Aztecs, the Incas, or it may just as well have been
archetypically “desired into being” by other American tribes. Basically
speaking, it was an aristocratic game reserved for the higher social classes.
Also, exceptionally talented players from outside the ordained aristocracy are
said to have won their way into the team. The weight of the Olmec ball with a
diameter of about 15
centimeters made the game a rather dangerous affair. The
players had to wear helmets, the forerunners of present day American football
helmets. One of the theories around the well-known stone balls weighing up to
40 tons each states that the basalt spheres represent the giant helmeted heads
of the Olmec rulers. At first, the playing fields or ballcourts were entrenched
areas or enclosed meadows, which later developed into real stadiums flanked
with walls. One of such stadiums was discovered at an ancient Olmec place
called Chichen Itza in Mexico. It
measured 90 meters
by 30 meters
with an 8 meter-high wall surrounding it.
Psychoanalytically,
what is interesting about the stadium is the specific details of the game,
having a classic and universal latent
libidinal structure: the side walls bore hoops made of stone or wood,
reminding one strangely of Naismith's basketball, which was invented about a
thousand years later and several thousand kilometers up North, in the Canadian
town of Springfield.
To further elucidate the universal (libidinal) paradigm of the “goal”, let us re-emphasize
that the North American paradigm of the hoop, ie. the basket, was not imported
from the Gulf of Mexico. Instead, James
Naismith invented or “desired the game into being” because of identical libidinal structures, inherent
to the mind of every male, even to that of a couple of thousand years ago. The
paradigm is universal because of the
universality of both the libidinal structure of the male mind and the
representatives of the sex drive: coitus, vagina, penis, castration or the
menacing castrator, ie. the father, and the object of desire having a vagina,
ie. the mother as experienced during infancy. The fact that the ball (phallus) was passed between the players
by feet, hips, elbows or torso and that the goal of the game was to throw the
ball, ie. symbolically copulate,
through the hoop, into the symbolic
vagina, shows that the game had a universal
and latent libidinal structure.
In those times, the game ended with the first team to successfully
"copulate with the adversary's (stolen) woman". By means of game
rules secondary elaboration redefined
the game by introducing a time limit and halftimes. The paradigm of the goal or
the basket, representing an opening through which the ball, ie. phallus, has to
be inserted, remains identical. Clearly, the secondary elaboration affected the game’s structure as early as
over one thousand years ago, all with the intention to make the game more
playable. Due to obvious difficulties in “scoring” (a goal,) the team that had
succeeded in carrying the ball outside the playing field was awarded a bonus
or, rather, some points. The game was (probably) a domain of men, who had
“desired the game into being”, still this does not necessarily mean that women
with a phalically structured personality
and hooked on infantile or Oedipal penis envy, would not have copied the men, entering the game or
even organizing their own by following the men's example. Surely, the males
must have felt certain (unconscious) reluctance
to include women in "their" games, for their unconscious mind was well aware
of the reason why such games had been invented in the first place: because of
women.
At
one point, for instance, Mesoamerican players generated the paradigm of
"the third person", i.e. the observer or spectator, which can be
explained by means of the processes of identification. Even then enthusiastic spectators
would continuously put bets on the game’s outcome. A Spanish chronicler reports
that even then there were bets on the winner of the ball game, which had a
special place in the paradigm of competitive or sports games. Because of the
increased affect, betting
substantially increases the pleasure.
The spectators would pawn their belongings, such as gold, turquoises, rich
garments, even slaves, fields, and houses. Agreeing at this point with the
thesis that the Mesoamerican game had a religious meaning would be an insult to
psychoanalysis. We may, however, very well say that the manifest interpretation of the game, which as any game had a latent
content, was religious and, in this way, we shall avoid offending classical
historians and anthropologists. But the latent
and manifest paradigms in the
structure of any game will throw some light on the libidinal side of the game. That people really tried to predict future
from the flight of the ball should primarily be regarded as mana, “something to fill in the lack of
sense”. Mana is typically inhabited
by the desire to be able to predict
the future for real, which does away with many an obscurity that may invoke either
pleasure or discomfort. Elimination of the element of random chance or
obscurity helps many people to feel relieved, which might have produced the
pleasure that contributed to the introduction of the desire to foretell the
future.
As
already indicated, the Mesoamerican ball game “outscored” the English kicking
of a dead Viking's head in cruelty and the amounts of spilt blood. Some of the
preserved Mesoamerican etchings suggest that the defeated team did not lose
just the match but their lives as well. Should the game in its manifestation really have been
understood as a religious ritual, it is well possible that the defeated team
was sacrificed to the gods. The manifest
side of decapitation is always coupled with the latent one. Freud emphasized now and again that decapitation
(always) means castration. On the latent symbolic level, the contestants
in sports have always been and will be sexual
competitors that males want to get rid of - at least by means of castration if not complete elimination,
and this is exactly why the competitive game (with its latent symbolic structure) evolved. The introduction of the
religiously interpreted manifestation or disguise makes symbolic castration in the form of elimination (decapitation) a
legitimate act. The sacrifice was not demanded by any deity but by the
(threatened) men, who as sexual competitors fought for the most favorable
position in wooing their (libidinal)
objects of desire – women as the successors of their Oedipally experienced mother. This is the universal libidinal paradigm which generated the agon paradigm of sports (or,
competitive) games, which always have a symbolic
libidinal structure.
This
sportological theoretical discourse needs a further in-depth look into the
theory of sports games. The principle of
reality, viz. the sexual inaccessibility of the desired woman, and the Superego make the sexual (coital)
pleasure with a woman impossible. As a way out of the frustrating situation,
the Ego, under an unbearable pressure
of the Id to gain sexual pleasure,
makes up, or rather, “desires up” a substitute
(subliminal, symbolic) satisfaction in the form of a sports game in which
the sexual rival, ie. a male as a sports competitor, is symbolically castrated, and the woman “in possession" of the
rival is symbolically coited with. In
this particular type of theorizing a (hetero)sexualized sports game, the Superego no longer plays an important
role as it has become redundant. The secondary
elaboration does not intervene with the game in any other way than it would
if the influence of the Superego was
present. Once codified, symbolization is introduced by universal - Freud would
call them "typical” - sports
substitute forms or symbols of
the basic representatives of the sex
drive, and the Superego fails to
comprehend, to “see” the sexuality of the (latent)
structure of a sports game. The Superego
is totally confused and duped by the codified symbolic structure. The Id
may now freely indulge in pleasure. The Superego,
satisfied, observes the goings-on in silence, without comprehending the (libidinally latently structured) symbolic coituses, which, as a matter of
fact, are under the Superego’s censorship.
In other words, the subject (individual) is
“interpellated" or hailed into the game outside the Superego's register of
sexuality.
Any
discussion of football cannot disregard the fact that the development of the
game was greatly improved by the regularity of the ball bounces and the clearly
defined rules, be it in football, handball, basketball or even volleyball (with
no goal in sight, the latent structure of volleyball is conceptually slightly
different and more complex in terms of interpretation). The secondary elaboration, subsequently,
made Naismith's basketball playable and helped define the rules in football.
The number of players settled at eleven, the size of the goal was defined, and
the size of the pitch was set at 90 to 120 meters in length and
at 45 to 90 meters
in width. The 16-meter penalty area and the goalkeeper's space were defined. A
centre circle was drawn to literally start the ball rolling. The match was
divided into two halftimes, each lasting 45 minutes. The penalty kicks and the
direct or the indirect free kicks were introduced. Fouls, misconducts, offside
positions, substitutions, overtime in case of a tie (in elimination matches),
penalties (red or yellow card or suspensions) were introduced. Also, referees
and their assistants were introduced, who soon gained the tag of the symbolic representation of the Father figure.
Likewise, the coach, who entered the sports paradigm or the paradigm of
training later on, at a “secondary” stage, soon acquired the role of the
symbolic representation of the
Father.
In
the web of all the "secondary" circumstances, the game became truly
playable, logical and reasonable. The changes were introduced gradually and in
different places, first of all in England. The written rules are
seconded by the unwritten ones, applying mostly to fair play. 1843 (according
to some sources: 1846) saw the printed codification of fairly uniform rules at Cambridge University, which favorably affected the
organization of football. The University football code served as a basis to the
newly founded English Football Association and was thereby clearly
distinguished from the game called rugby, which was well spread around the town
of Rugby in the
middle of the 19th century. The new code of football was, however,
first observed only twenty years later during a match between London
and Sheffield. The match was a surprise to
many sports (football) fans and was considered a watershed in the (established)
way of thinking. Until that time, nobody had thought of organizing football
clashes between two teams from fairly distant places. After a couple of years, fifteen
(eleven according to some sources) English football teams collected the money
to finance the first Cup as the prize and then competed to determine the
winner. The popularity of the game was increased through the chain of these
events as well as by the libidinal latent
structure of the game linked to pleasure
and the identification of the
spectators. The 1901 Cup Final was watched by more than 100,000 people.
Even
before Pierre de Coubertin’s revival of the Olympic Games towards the end of
the 19th century, football had been spreading all over Europe at an
extraordinary pace, especially with the help from English workers, since there
was long-distance transportation, and migrations between continents had become
a fairly everyday occurrence. Great
Britain had a considerable number of colonies
all around the world.
Football
was spread to the East by merchants. A textile trader is said to have presented
it to the Russians. Turkey
saw the first officially recorded match between the teams of English workers or
officials at the British Embassy in Istanbul and
Greek students who had seen the game played in England. The English were keen
travelers, and once traveling by train was made possible and relatively
comfortable, tourism took off and had its fair share of influence in the spread
of the game. Football was brought to South America or Brazil, today a
football super power, by sailors as early as 1870, yet its zealous spread did
not happen before several decades later.
Canada, Australia and New Zealand started with their own,
rather loose rules, making their ball game look like a hybrid between rugby and
football. However, the paradigms of the goal
and that of two opposing teams (involved in a conflict) were nevertheless
observed - agon in classical Greek
means conflict (opposition), rather than a competition in the modern sense of
the word.
During
the period of the boom of "English football" the USA had
cultivated its own sports. Particularly popular even then was American
football, a variant of rugby. The first official intercollegiate match was
played in New Brunswick, New Jersey, on November 6th, 1869.
As was the case with football, rugby caught on for the same reason, because the
male unconscious has (universal) libidinal
dispositions which process the American touchdown as libidinal investments charged with affect, or, rather, "energized”. That something in humans that
experiences pleasure is the Id, the
only one to be capable of "reading" and understanding the language of
symbols (the Ego and the Superego
cannot compare with the Id in this
meta-space). Something in the game becomes “pleasurable” only when the Id is taken by symbolic representation. That “something” that acquires the status
of a symbol in a game means that its manifest content is not what is
perceived or comprehended by our
consciousness or the Ego. It is
in fact an entirely “different” matter, which is libidinal, latently concealed, encoded. A sports game needs to be
translated or decoded to make sure that its latent
message is understood. What is essential is the
symbolic, unconscious, latent, and not the manifest content. Once again: the
structure and logic of a sports game is as good as identical with that of
dreams. Sports may truly be interpreted on the basis of practically
identical concepts as used in dream interpretation by Freud. That latent basis
of a competitive or sports game presents fulfillment
of an unconscious and sexually structured desire, which Freud, making a connection with children’s games,
applied to his interpretation of some segments of art, more specifically to
literature.
During
his entire life, Freud endeavored to write a scientific theoretical work for
his successors to lean on when trying to understand and explain the human
mental pathos and society in general. We, however, focused here on sports and presented
a meta-psychological approach that
might be helpful in understanding sports, if, of course, the readers manage to
rid themselves of the dislikes
provoked by such pan(hetero)sexual theories. We shall ignore here the thought
that Freud might have resented the above presented idea of the original
heterosexuality of the human mind; hopefully, genetics will succeed before much
longer in finding a clear answer as to the genetic determination of the
heterosexuality of the human mental gender, which, affected by (a specific type
of) "upbringing" or primary
identification and in spite of the "normal" genes, can still be
subject to further reinterpretation or even revision.
(Tim Vodeb - joy, scoring a goal)
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Internet resources:
http://www.oprah.com/tows/pastshows/tows_2000/tows_past_20000209_c.jhtml
http://www.oprah.com/tows/pastshows/tows_2000/tows_past_20000209_b.jhtml
http://www.inventions.org/culture/ancient/mexican.html
http://www.personal.psu.edu/users/w/x/wxk116/romeball.html
http://www.britannica.com/search?query=soccer&ct=&fuzzy=N
http://www.freud.org.uk/Football.htm
Roman Vodeb has two sons: Tim (1990) & Nik (1994), both are football/soccer-players.
