Sick sport
Hans Keller
The Champions: The Secret Motives in Games and Sport Peter Fuller (Allen Lane £6.50)
Before we tear the author to pieces, we must make sure that he receives the profound respect he deserves. He certainly doesn't receive it on the flap: did he never read it? There we are told about 'a subconscious urge for self-destruction', 'a subconscious world of sexual fantasy, power complex and neurosis ... ' From such drivel, the casual visitor to a bookshop might wrongly infer that Peter Fuller's alleged knowledge of psychoanalysis is skin-shallow, has never penetrated to the depths of the unconscious which, in psychoanalytic theory, turns the concept of a 'subconscious' into so much lukewarm air.
On the contrary, Peter Fuller is exceptionally knowledgeable about psychoanalysis, especially its more orthodox developments, and has absorbed, firsthand, many a classical psychoanalytic discovery which, nowadays, even active analysts sometimes only know from hearsay. He has read and understood (as one should) Helene Deutsch, Otto Fenichel, Sandor Ferenczi, Ernest Jones, Melanie Klein and, lonely Englishman, Charles Rycroft. A pity, this comparative neglect of the secondary, English field: had Mr Fuller read J.C. Flugel, he would have found the Polycrates complex a very handy tool when he came to discuss the need for punishment. Needless to add, the author knows (and indeed understands) his Freud backwards, priest-like: not only did Freud never utter a wrong syllable, but to quote him, to quote any theoretical idea at any stage of his complex development is simply to state fact.
This book does not try to demonstrate a general theory of championship. The range of activities which can lead to this condition [sic], the proliferation of different levels of involvement which it can embrace, the diversity of persons engaged in the pursuit of it and the variety of determining factors involved do not prompt monolithic explanations.
Within a sentence, the uncorrupted reader will note, Mr Fuller has taken the first step, unobtrusive but decisive, towards turning championship into an illness — by verbal magic. It follows that his declaration about the limitations of his book is, alas, far too modest: he is, in fact, trying to do the very thing he says he's not trying to do, and pretty speedily too. A few lines further down, that is, we read that 'time and time again a pattern is repeated, a pattern which is just as apparent, for example, among chess champions as among Grand Prix aces', and by the end of the paragraph, the wholesale diagnosis is complete, prepared to withstand any doubts that may arise in the agnostic's mind in the course of the next 350-odd pages: 'Championship is often necessary for the champion in the same sense that a given symptomformation is necessary for the neurotic.'
We've taken off, and from an allsurveying aerial position, Bobby Fischer. El Cordobes 'and other killers of bulls'. Muhammed Ali, Jackie Stewart, Ascari. the Campbells, Lester Piggott, and Free Archer (to mention but nine), are being reduced to their respective unconscious motivations, except that these aren't all that respective: after all, what distinguishes people from each other is theit egos, not their ids, nor indeed then unconscious superegos, and once we have re-individualized the lot of them, the exposure of their 'secret motives' is plain sailing.
There are, of course, frequent ritualistic assurances that no degradation is taking place: 'In conclusion it should be said that none of this is intended to detract from Al's achievement ... ' In the first place, however, the question of intent doesn't arise. It does with murder, or a foul in football, or indeed with loitering with intent to commit a felony; but in human and literary relations, an offence can be all the worse for not even having been recognised by the offender. In the second place, I don't altogether believe you, Mr Fuller; even though I don't doubt your honesty. While you are preoccupied with these champions' unconscious intentions, I am preoccupied with your own unconscious intentions.
Throughout your book, I find a constant flow of ambivalence, which compels you to take those who presume above their station down a peg or two: this is where J. C. Flugel's Polycrates complex comes
in handy for me . You certainly have intelligent things to say about the need for punishment, but in the process, you forget all about your own need to punish the champions. As a result, you naively impose ral own values on these contrasting Per sonalities, and when you want something to be irrational in order to throw its psr chopathology into relief, it is assumed to be irrational: you, 'we' know better. Bobby Fischer's attitude to school is a shining example: You don't learn anything in school. It's just a waste of time. You lug around books and all and do homework. Nobody's interested in it. The teachers are stupid ... I don't remember one thing I learned in school ... You have to mix with all those stupid kids. The teachers are even stupider than the kids. They talk down to the kids. Hall of them are crazy. If they'd have let me, I'd have quit before I was sixteen This view of school life, rather radical but much of it eminently sensible, is near-identical with Robert Morley's as expressed in his very personal television programme under the title One Pair of Eyes, re-transmitted the other week; 'has the inestimable advantage of opPosing what Fischer, Morley and my humble self consider the craze of established education — whereas all Peter Fuller notices about it is Bobby Fischer's craze. `This, from the son of a former school teacher, he exclaims with delight. Well, Robert Morley isn't a school teacher's son, ni3r, am I — but then, Peter Fuller is concernen with Bobby Fischer's Oedipus comPlex (to mention but one of nine) rather than ours, and jolly lucky we are. , The rest of the story is quickly told; apart from the unresolved Oedipus coinplex in general, there is the unresolved castration complex in particular. There is, of course, `omnipotence related to castration anxiety' (All's, for instance), and there is, inevitably, obsessional neurosis> as bad as that which we call religion, Peter Fuller's religion excepted: The characterisation and interpretation of championship sport which repeatedlY emerges from this text is in manY nificant respects comparable to Freud's analysis of religion and religious Practices.
I am not throwing any doubt on the complexes discovered by psychoanalysis, their universality and elemental efficacy; but their very all-pervasiveness makes all the more incumbent upon us sharplY to differentiate between human Psr chology as a whole and individual PsY" chology; otherwise, all we are saying; page in page out, is that that's life. moreover, we commit the fundamentt fallacy of pathologising all conflict, an hence the whole of psychodynainics, rapidly approach the stage, foreseen bY Thomas Szasz with alleged intemPera;ncie.,' where all life, from conception to cleat is one long sickness — a stage tovvar° which Peter Fuller urges us with downright disarming naivety. One knew it all from the moment go — in fact, before the moment go: 'the secret motives in games and sport' indeed! There are, strictly, two types of secrets — things to be kept private, and things you couldn't tell if you tried. Peter Fuller's is the former type: he discloses his champions' secrets — secrets so secret that they even keep them from themselves. Right or wrong, therefore, he is committing an assault, whose effect must needs be degrading, establishing as it does a disproportion between motivation and achievement. He might, of course, say that I am doing the same thing to him — and he's absolutely right: it is my earnest desire to assault him, in defence of those assaulted, and those who admire, and Perhaps even identify with them. The other type of secret Peter Fuller may or may not know about. It is what some of us call a secret science, but even those who are out of sympathy with any such discipline have found themselves in situations where any attempt to communicate an overwhelming experience — say, of a work of art — was doomed to failure. Now, the psychoanalytic experience itself is one such secret: you've either undergone it, or you can't be told What it is. I personally would say there is nothing to beat self-analysis, but that may be special pleading, and I can't compare anyway. What I am leading up to is the climax of my assault: Mr Fuller either hasn't had it, or his analytic transference
situation was never resolved, so that he has to go on doing to other people what he feels was done to him. And if that's unfair, it makes it a draw.
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