Unpacking Depth Sport Psychology

Download or read book Unpacking Depth Sport Psychology written by Tom Ferraro and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-03-30 with total page 136 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book utilizes a wealth of case studies to demonstrate the importance of using depth sport psychology to explore and understand athletes’ unconscious feelings and fears, and provides the knowledge needed to help athletes deal with pressures faced throughout their sporting career. Applying the theories of Sigmund Freud, Alfred Adler, Carl Jung, Margaret Mahler, Melanie Klein, Heinz Kohut, Donald Winnicott, and Christopher Bollas to explain the dynamics within the athlete’s mind, this useful resource will help develop a better understanding of athlete’s repressed feelings and psychological states. It looks past the cognitive behavioural techniques currently used to aid athletes, and instead focuses on the many ways the unconscious subtly influences athletes, offering an important a paradigm shift. Covering a range of different athletes within various sports, each chapter demonstrates how the psychoanalytic techniques of free association, the working alliance, analytic interpretations, confrontation, dream analysis, transference/counter transference and resistance analysis are used with athletes. Case studies cover such topics as the treatment of anxiety, yips, anger, guilt and perfectionism in the athlete, the influence of birth order, psychological defences used by athletes including gamesmanship, dissociation and humor, and the psychology of injury. Unpacking Depth Sport Psychology is the ideal resource for students, the educated athlete, parents, professors, sport psychologists, and coaches who hope to improve the athletes’ performance.