Sporting life
Sublime games
by Michael Brearley
Is there room in sport for the concept of the sublime? Or does the very mention of the idea qualify me for Private Eye’s Pseuds Corner?
Wilfred Bion (1897-1979) was an influential, creative and enigmatic British psychoanalyst. Born in India, to English parents, he was sent to school at Bishop’s Stortford College at the age of eight, spending every holiday as a guest in the houses of friends. It was more than three years before he saw his mother again.
In 1916, he joined a tank regiment as an officer and fought in the battles of Ypres, Passchendaele, Cambrai and Amiens. Recommended for a Victoria Cross, he was awarded the Distinguished Service Order for exemplary courage. He said later: “I thought I might with equal relevance have been recommended for a court-martial. It all depended on the direction which one took when one ran away.”
His early life was, then, painful and lonely. One thing that gave him solace was sport. In his memoirs he writes gnomically about the possibility of “sublime” games, and indeed of sublime religion.
“Sublimation,” he says, “was used by some for what in fact was a substitution. Games were substituted for sex; even religion was thought of by the more advanced as if it were some harmless substitute. No one thought that sublimation could mean the reaching for, yearning for, games that were sublime, a religion that was sublime and not a stopper that could dam back the noxious matter until it stank, or bury the growth of the personality till it turned cancerous.”