“The guilt dies single”

Nsunday, September 20, in Madrid, José Mourinho entered the press room with an A4 sheet in his hand. It had printed two photographs of bids from the derby that Real Madrid had just lost by 2-1 with Atlético. He showed them to the journalists and said the conference was expendable because the game story was there. The next day, Atlético responded, on social networks, with a printer printing the photograph of Mourinho himself and a sentence against harassment to referees.

That same night, in the Dragon, FC Porto won Benfica 3-1. The ritual that we know was followed: one club ensured that “weird things” had not happened; the other responded with a video of “very normal things”, there were accusations of duality of criteria, requests for suspension of the Arbitration Council, an obscene gesture and even a piece of hard bread thrown at the opposing bank.

I don't care who's right about the ratings. There are experts for that. I won't psychoanalyze anyone from a distance either. As I wrote in the last chronicle, it has a name – wild psychoanalysis – and I do not. I am interested in something else, which is public and which we all see: how quickly, in group sports, and in football in particular, defeat becomes injustice. And what this operation says about us, viewers, that we judge.

A world divided into good and bad

Melanie Klein described, in the first months of her life, a psychic mode of operation she called schizo-paranoid position. Sounds like a bad word, but I'll try to explain it in a simple way.

First of all, a word Psychoanalysis uses in its own way: object. For us, it's not a thing. It is that, or that, in which we put our love, our hatred, our hope. Almost always a person, but a person as we bring her in, not exactly as she is. Freud noticed that even an idea, or a country, can occupy this place. For many fans, so is the club.

For the baby, the first object isn't even the whole mother. It's the breast that feeds, or lacks. There's no middle ground. And when it is missing, hunger, or the absence of a lap, for example, are felt as an attack. Unable to endure this anguish, the baby divides the breast into two: a good breast – perfect, giving; and a bad breast – that denies and pursues. More: it is for the bad bosom that throws its own anger, which thus ceases to be yours. The threat is there, in the Other, where it attacks him.

Klein insisted on another important point: this is not a phase that goes beyond once and for all. It is a position; a psychic place to which we return, throughout life, whenever anguish squeezes. And few things awaken her as much as a defeat lived before millions of eyes.

When it's the referee's fault, the team stays intact. Coach stays intact. And above all, the adept who put an important part of himself and all his love in that club remains intact. Defeat ceases to be a loss and becomes a theft. And a robbery doesn't cry. He denounces himself.

The Hardest Position

To the schizo-paranoid position, Klein countered the depressive position. The name deceives: it has nothing to do with depression, in the common sense. It's the moment the baby discovers that the mother who feeds him and the mother who frustrates him are the same person. The object becomes total, good and bad at the same time. With this discovery comes ambivalence, concern for the damage caused and desire to repair. It's an achievement, and it's a condition for mourning to happen.

In football, the depressive position can be said like this: we played badly, we failed, the other was better, and it hurts. Interestingly, something similar was heard in the Dragon, when Marco Silva stated that they had lost the game and that they had to look at themselves. It's a rare phrase in our football. And it tends to last a little. Usually, the arbitrator's criteria and the conditioning of arbitration are quickly returned. This shows, with almost didactic sharpness, the oscillation Klein described and that Bion would come to think of as a permanent movement between the two positions. Getting to the depressed position is not the hardest. It's hard to stay there.

On the other hand, there's a price not everyone can afford. In a small club, or with a little known coach, assuming defeat is often heard as confession: he said so himself, so go out! When the referee does not arrive, the evil must be deposited elsewhere, and the coach is the scapegoat most at hand. Expelling him gives the group the illusion of having expelled defeat.

Besides, whoever wins is not safe either. The irony of the winners, which turns the rival's complaint into a joke, also takes place in the Kleinian theory: triumph and contempt are manic defenses, ways not to feel the dependence of the Other and the guilt it brings.

What this does to fans

A coach or a president who, after defeat, points out the referee, is not just talking about a bid. It is offering thousands of people a way to “find frustration”: evil is out there and has a face. Bion, in his work with groups, described an operation which he called the basic assumption of escape-fighting: the group starts to behave as if they had gathered to fight an enemy, or to flee from it, and seeks a leader who points it at them. In that register, the group stops thinking and starts acting. There are coaches who look like “experts” in this embroidery, and this is how they motivate the group to win. 

There's still one consequence that worries me as a clinic. The club teaches Sunday after Sunday a way to deal with the loss. And many of those who are learning are ten, twelve, fifteen. A child who hears, week after week, that when one loses the blame it's always someone from outside, gets less instruments to lose in school, in love, in life. And to learn something from it.

Losing well

The referees are not untouchable, and not all suspicion is projection. In June, the Technical Director of Arbitration of the Portuguese Federation resigned after raising concerns about nominations, and the case went to the Public Prosecutor. There are mistakes, some serious ones. Critics are legitimate and necessary. The problem is not criticism, it is the function it fulfills. There is a criticism that seeks to understand what went wrong: that speech of the referee, but also the goal we failed and the marking that we did not make. And there's another one that just tries not to feel defeat: this one can only talk about the referee, because if he admits one of our mistakes, the pain comes back in.

It would be so interesting to hear from time to time a press conference where sheet A4 brought our own mistakes... Not out of humility of facade, but because this is where the best football has to teach us: that it is possible to lose, suffer from it, and come back the next Sunday with the desire to win. In Psychoanalysis, we call this elaboration.