ABSTRACT
The psychiatrist Harry Sullivan recognised the importance and inevitability of interpersonal relationships in human life. Specifically, he outlined how the field of psychology ‘is the field of interpersonal relations … a personality can never be isolated from the complex of interpersonal relations in which the person lives and has his being’ (1940, p. 10, italics added). For Sullivan, human beings have a fundamental need for interpersonal relations and nothing is a more significant determinant of psychological well-being and quality of experience than the nature of our connections to the people around us. The centrality of human relationships is obviously a defining feature of attachment theory and as such it is particularly important to explore how attachment characteristics are linked to the development and maintenance of significant human relationships through the lifespan. By virtue of the fact that sport is often a microcosm of broader human exis-
tence, interpersonal relationships in sport are of critical import with regard to psychological functioning within sport and wider experiences of life itself. As such, there have been calls to recognise the significance of interpersonal relationship research within the sporting literature (e.g. Carr, 2009a; Jowett & Wylleman, 2006; Poczwardowski et al., 2006; Smith, 2003; Wylleman, 2000). Jowett and Wylleman (2006) have identified that sport researchers
are fortunate enough to have at our disposal such a large array of psychological theories about interpersonal relationships, their application in understanding relationships in sport and exercise would be paramount and could in turn bring about insights to the broader social psychological phenomena.
