Oakland University Psi Chi

By Andrew Madison

On Saturday February 6^th, the Michigan Psychoanalytic Society (MPI) hosted the event “Passion, Rage and Disbelief: A Journey Through the Mind of the Sports Fan.”  This was a perfect example of the many interesting discussions that take place at the MPI.  Have you ever watched a sporting event and gotten so angry about the outcome that you find yourself screaming at the T.V.?  Maybe you’re a Lions fan, and you’ve found the past decade to be a bit depressing.  Or maybe you grew up in a household where the outcome of a Red Wings game directly influenced the mood of your family.  This was a great meeting where these topics and more were discussed.

Joshua Ehrlich, Ph.D., a professor at the University if Michigan, lead the discussion and talked about a broad range of topics such as what it was like growing up with a family that worshiped the Boston Red Sox.  Between 1918 and 2004, the Red Sox did not win the World Series, although they came considerably close several times, and it’s lead to good things and bad things in the community.  In 1986, the Boston Red Sox almost won the World Series against the New York Mets, but an easy ground ball play went through the hands of Bill Buckner, in one of the classic baseball games in Major League Baseball History.  As a result, Bill Buckner was mercilessly mocked and hated in the city of Boston, and now Buckner’s wife is begging hecklers to leave her son alone, who is trying to become a baseball player. Ehrlich talked about many other negative effects when fans get too into their favorite athletes or teams, and how it affects families and individuals.

One of the more comical stories he told was of a male client who was a big fan of the Philadelphia 76ers.  One day he and his family went out to dinner and had what he described as a good night with his family.  But when they came back home, he turned on the television and discovered that his beloved 76ers had lost that night, causing him to trash the living room.  This made the man decide that he needed therapy.  He began seeing Dr. Ehrlich regularly, but Ehrlich soon found out that this was due to the superstitious belief that attending therapy was attributing to the 76ers recent success.  Sure enough when the 76ers went on a losing streak, the man discontinued therapy with Dr. Ehrlich.

One of the main psychological questions tackled on this day was what exactly makes sports fans feel so attached to professional athletes, most likely people that they don’t even know.  The main effects were summarized in 4 diagrams handed out to everyone that came to the event.  The first diagram was how self-object relating and empathy are directly related.  Ehrlich described how many people will use self-object relating with their favorite athletes, musicians, actors and more, and how by self-relating we idols to live out desires.  For example, say someone wanted to be a basketball player all their life, became an accountant, but still loved watching basketball.  By watching a favorite team or athlete and relating themselves to the idea, it leads to feelings of empathy towards the individual(s).

The second diagram was called sports fans’ enactment of fantasy.  This diagram describes the spectrum of fans that might root or act ritualistic towards a sports team, fantasy leagues, or video games.  On one end of the spectrum called dehumanizing fantasy within the mind, athletes fantasize about a connection between themselves and the athlete.  On the other end of the spectrum is dehumanizing fantasy expressed non-consensually.  An extreme example of this is the case of Monica Seles.  Seles was one of the best tennis players of her generation, winning the 1990 French open at the age of 16, but was forced to take a break from the sport in 1993.  A fan of Seles’ rival Steffi Graf jumped onto the court during a match and stabbed Seles with a 10 inch-long knife.  In the next two diagrams, the same passion and self-object relating was related to celebrity stalkers and sexual predators.  I think that one of the points Ehrlich was trying to make is that extreme athlete worship can lead to very negative things if the obsession becomes too much.

The MPI offers many other interesting topics like this, including the presentation “Immigrant Meets Therapist, Therapy Meets Integration”, “Helping Children, Adolescents and Their Parents Deal with Divorce”, and “Self and Other Are Two Sides of the Same Coin: How the Brain’s Shared Circuits Influence the Transference and Coutertransference.”  For information on these and other events, visit www.mpi-mps.org.