ABSTRACT
The athletic community has developed ways of talking about, understanding, and attempting to influence these intangible factors, especially psychological ones. The entire community, in fact, has a lively interest in things mental, and this has created a fertile environment for the work of sports psychiatry. Sports psychiatry is community and consultation psychiatry. As team psychiatrist readers may, at various times, attend practices, hang out in the training room, attend banquets and social functions, and have a variety of conversations with administrators, owners, coaches, medical personnel, families, agents, police officers, lawyers, and journalists, as well as the athletes themselves. Enter the psychiatrist, stirring up feelings, establishing a private dialogue, promoting autonomous judgment, encouraging people to talk about matters often swept under the rug. Surprising achievements and unexpected failures during competition evoke reference to intangible factors, among them subterfuge, divine intervention, and psychology.
