Sport performance and identity construction in adolescence: a psychoanalytic reading of the ego and the environment

Abstract

This article examines, from a psychoanalytic standpoint, the part played by sport performance in the construction of identity and the organisation of the ego during adolescence. Starting from the Freudian formulation of the ego as a mediating agency and from Erikson's thesis of adolescence as a crisis of identity, it asks what the sporting field offers to the psychic work of this period: a rule-governed set of experiences of gain and loss, a peer group, authority figures invested as identificatory models, and a body summoned to perform. It is argued that sport exerts no univocal effect on psychic structuring. It operates as a holding environment and potential space where someone is present to receive and give form to frustration; it becomes a device of subjective alienation where the adolescent's worth comes to coincide with his or her output. Between these two destinies lie phenomena described in the clinical literature: exclusive athletic identity, parental projection of unrealised wishes, early competition and the logic of high performance. Football is further discussed as a symbolic field of belonging in Brazilian culture. The decisive factor is not sporting practice itself but the conditions surrounding it.