“Sport is nothing but a glorified form of criminal behaviour,”
says Jasper Teerlinck, the fictional professor of criminology in the Belgian TV series “Professor T”.
He came to this conclusion after years of watching the many ways in which people act out their aggressive impulses.
That is how the human psyche works. It contains drives of two kinds: libidinal ones, which guard life, and aggressive ones, which guard death. Each of us expresses and lives through them in our own way. Take a tricky situation at work, when you need to bring colleagues and partners at different levels on board to launch a new product. On the one hand, you are sure the results will be good and the product will be useful; on the other, you have to spend a great deal of energy convincing others of this and overcoming the inertia of the system.
Or take another everyday example of this pair of drives: falling for someone while being in a stable family relationship. You have to choose between infatuation and duty, and in the moment the choice is not always obvious.
So where does sport come in?
Sport is a “legitimate” way of living out this duality of drives. It lets us express ourselves in an acceptable, socially approved way and teaches us to make the decisions this requires. Sport helps us master the most important skill of all — running our own lives.
Sport:
Trains and develops a range of skills
Helps us understand ourselves, our abilities and our limitations — to see where our limits are and to grow beyond them.
Lets us manage our emotions and feelings, and gives us a way to influence our mood.
Gives us the pleasure of mastering our own body as we train.
Depending on whether a sport is individual or team-based, it trains essential everyday skills and develops qualities that build resilience and help us succeed in life. Sport can become a source of inspiration and enjoyment, a place to release tension and a way to let your emotions out.
Achievements don’t come easily.
The coach plays a key role: they watch you from the outside during training and, knowing the technique and drawing on their own sporting experience, can offer advice or effective feedback to improve your results, build stamina and help you keep your emotions in check. It was by observing how effective this coach–athlete pairing is that coaching as a practice was born. And just as sport helps us shape a new image of our body, train our skills and find an ally within ourselves, coaching helps us reach the goals we set. It all happens through finding an effective approach that suits you personally.
Psychoanalytic coaching lets you see the particular traits that have formed through your life experience and transform them, in the course of coaching, into new and effective skills.
Like sport, psychoanalytic coaching lets you look inside yourself, find the moments when things get hard, work through them and get different results. And the coach as an ally gradually “settles in” inside you — to support and encourage you, and to help you find resources for new tasks in the future that will be interesting and transformative.
Psychotherapist, psychoanalytic psychotherapy · 7 years in practice
Sessions in person (Moscow) and online; any request. I work with emotional states, with your relationship with yourself and with other people, and with professional and personal growth.
