Orbitofrontal Cortex
“I saw her orbitofrontal cortex in the changeroom and damn, is it well developed!” Print E-mail
Tuesday, 16 December 2008
The Olympics isn’t usually a forum that brings mental health to mind. Physically perfect human specimens, running around winning at things? Nietzsche would be delirious with happiness. All that will to power! All that physical beauty! It’s like Riefenstahl, only without the Nazi overtones. Because, you know, after 1945 that particular climate just, uh, disappeared. Leni who? Lucky the Lucky Country was insulated from all that Euro guff, so we could just exercise our way into the physically perfect future. After all, no Dupain, no gain.
DoCS?
However, despite that sheen of Darwinian physical perfection, contemporary elite athletes seem to have become more intense, and well, odd, since the 80’s. The Olympic motto is “citius, altius, fortius”, but the Olympic creed makes it clear that participation and valour are above all valued beyond triumph and victory. You wouldn’t know that with the 2008 Olympics, where winning gold (AND ONLY GOLD) means you bellow until your jugular veins are clearly visible, strike victory postures that accentuate your abs and generally toe the border of jingoism in a competition that’s meant to celebrate the inclusive spirit of man. No gold? Sorry – just the bitter bitter tears of defeat welling up in your eyes and spilling over while your country calls you a traitor. Because you are! Remember kids, silver = first loser.
The Australian zeitgeist was completely borderline during this time, idealising goldlympians and practically vomiting in disgust at the looooosers (everybody else, including any pathetic silver and bronze-toting Australian failures). Of course we couldn’t tolerate this view of ourselves when we caught it in a mirror, so in primitively-defended fashion we tittered at the mainland Chinese public’s extreme reactions to hurdler Liu Xiang’s race-ending injury or diver Zhou Luxin’s ‘loss’ against Mitcham (bah! Luxin and his filthy worthless taels of silver!).
Subsequently and in almost diametric contrast, competing Paralympians seemed overjoyed to have been there, glad when they won but also in good humour when they lost, supportive of their opponents and with a bonhomie you’d expect from well adjusted humans to whom winning gold was just icing on the cake. Despite critical commentary around the world regarding China’s laughably old-fashioned views on the disabled (which conveniently forgot the 150 year battle for the rights of the disabled in ‘the West’, whatever that term means), the Paralympics were openly noted by the IPC president and team leaders of the French and Russian teams to have been the best Paralympics yet.
With all of the focus on Olympic gold, it’s as if the Olympians were children of Tofler’s Achievement by Proxy spectrum. Tofler conceptualised a type of child abuse where the gifted child (as in Alice Miller’s drama of the gifted child) is co-opted in an abusive process where the parents divest themselves of their child-rearing responsibilities in the defence that they are helping the child achieve their full potential, while the child, fearful of the often real loss of parental approval, proclaims that their desire to participate in inappropriate activities is theirs, activities such as ballet or competitive gymnastics, with their rigid diets of air and mineral water. Bhurruth’s recent paper on group analysis and the Tour de France notes that individual psychoanalysis is destructive to an athlete’s performance because they start to question why they’re pushing themselves so hard.
The outcome of this is that post-ABP Olympians are weird narcissists whose refined diet includes only national approval and gold medals with a garnish of advertising revenue, while the Paralympians are like fortunate victims of mental selection – because those able to live through or live with various disabling conditions and still emerge elite athletes at the other end of training are probably very psychologically resilient.
Meanwhile, is anyone surprised that AFL players are sociopaths? To its supporters AFL is a high powered game of chess with an oval shaped ball, and to everybody else it’s a parochial cult based around re-enactments of bar brawls where the players punch each other while waiting for the ‘ball’ to get kicked. It’s a game that seems to reward violence and aggression, and while the formal rewards don’t exactly extend to violating liquor licensing rules, infidelity, random assaults, glassing your de facto in the face or date rape, etc etc, well, there’s always chaining and shaping.
Who of us has at some stage not desired strong white teeth, shapely buns and thighs that can burst a small melon? Maybe we should remind people that the brain is also a very large, metabolically expensive marker of sexual fitness. It’ll work, at least until people realize that there’s a positive correlation between untanned cachexia and IQ.
The “Achievement by Proxy” Spectrum, Tofler et al, Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, 1999, 38(2): 213
A Group Analytic Understanding of the Tour de France: Why the Fittest Rider Does Not Necessarily Win, Martin Bhurruth, Group Analysis, Vol. 41, No. 3, 227-239 (2008)
http://www.bbc.co.ukthereporters2008/08/when_losing_becomes_a_national.html