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OUT OF LEFT FIELD |
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OF THE NATIONAL PASTIME
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...Or Could Sigmund
Hit a Curve Ball?
of TheColumnists.com
It is the time of new beginnings; it is the time of a new baseball season. It is the time for the often-cited quote by scholar Jacques Barzun that, “Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of Americans had better learn baseball.”
I enjoy it when ivory tower thinkers turn their thoughts to baseball. I treasure still a paper read a long time ago at an American Psychoanalytic Association meeting. It was “Baseball and the Primal Hordes; Psychoanalytic Reflections,” by Dr. Thomas A. Petty, a psychiatrist of Grosse Pointe Park, Michigan.
The good doctor came from way out in left field to tread where no press-box brain would dare. Basing his findings on Sigmund Freud’s theory of the primal horde killing the primal father, Petty said, “The game of baseball is a mock combat in which the unconscious fantasy of the sons’ (or brothers’) triumph over the father is insured for the participant and the spectator.”
In words that might be grasped more easily in the bleachers, Petty saw baseball as a battle of sons to overwhelm the domination of the father The sons are the batters and the father is represented by the pitcher. Eventually, the sons must win because the batters almost always score runs to knock the pitcher out of the game.
Petty wrote, “The violence of the combat in baseball is concentrated in the contact between the ball and the bat. The ball is simultaneously a surrogate of the pitcher-father and a missile or weapon by which the pitcher-father is to be vanquished. The bat is simultaneously a surrogate of the ambitious batter-son.
“Intimately related to this action is the fact that the pitcher is throwing the ball not to the batter, but to the catcher, who receives the ball in a large, deep-pocketed mitt.”
The catcher is, of course, the symbolic mother.
Petty said, “The mother and father playing catch would like to be able to ignore the batter’s presence but cannot. He intrudes upon and may interrupt the pitcher’s phallic exhibition of ‘stuff.’ [spoiling] the game of catch between the symbolic primal parents.”
This is strong stuff. It doesn’t fit in with established baseball theory about how to hit a slider or the worth of the infield fly rule. Serious baseball thinkers might send Petty to the showers. But he hung in there and kept a high hop on his fast one with this pitch:
“Baseball, as a team game, is characteristic of post-oedipal play. In this phase of childish development, which starts about the age of 6, the central theme of play is sibling relations and fear of superego and superego figures. The anxieties are related to the struggle for independence and equality. Reassurance is sought in becoming a member of a group, following a chosen leader, observing the rules of the game.”
He saw the baseball diamond, with its three bases and home plate “remindful of the four-cornered area in which the infant takes its first tentative steps-the crib, the playpen, the room. Commonly, the first steps the crawler takes without the support of its mother are to a substitute base of security, such as a chair or table. And the next steps are back to the mother.
“Soon, instead of returning to the mother, the toddler ventures from the first to a second substitute base of security and eventually to a third and so on. By the time a fourth has been reached, the anxiety over the toddling, by mother and child, has vanished.”
He continued, “Thus the toddler’s hesitant completion of his excursion from base to base or corner to corner of the room and the emotional response of both child and parent bear a striking resemblance to the home run of the ballplayer and the emotional response of teammates and fans.”
I suppose I was trying to impress Petty when I added a footnote to his home run theory. I told him that “it might be pertinent to mention that the first of the popular baseball heroes was Babe Ruth, and he made a particularly joyous ritual out of a home run by laughing and doing a jig in his excursion around the bases before returning to his home, or mother, base.”
When I called Petty in Detroit at the time he wrote the paper, he said he was a Detroit Tigers fan. He said he had written his paper out of a long period of personal observations as a psychoanalyst, eschewing association with fascinating egotistical types like then Tigers manager Charley Dressen. He said his findings were received “with interest, amusement and ridicule. One person wrote that he can’t enjoy the game anymore.”
Petty cited a theory that all modern games played with bat and ball trace to the ancient fertility rites observed by priest-kings in Egypt at the time of the pyramids. He said, “It is significant that baseball begins in the spring, the very time of year of the fertility rites.”
Returning to Freud’s theory of the primal horde (son) killing the primal father (pitcher) Petty labeled the game spectacle “a totem feast acted out continuously during the game by the fans, who down tremendous quantities of food and drink.:” Also significant, day games usually end at meal time and night games at a snack hour “which often assumes the aspects of a totem feast for player and spectator alike.”
Now that the cry of “Play ball” sounds across the land again, these are matters to think about when you are settled in a seat at the ball park or in the living room (the symbolic couch, perhaps?) You might see more significance in the ritual now. There may be deeper meaning than you or I or Dr. Petty ever dreamed of in that rarest of all fertility rites, the winning of a late-season pennant-race struggle by that most primal of hordes, the Mets.
©2009 by Stan Isaacs. The Stan Isaacs caricature is ©2001 by Jim Hummel. The illustration is from IMSI's Master Clips Collection, 1895 Francisco Blvd. E., San Rafael, CA, 94901-5506, USA. This column first posted March 30, 2009.
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