Who needs more love?

So Who Needs More Love? (Art Janov's Reflection)

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Who needs more love?

Practical consequences of being deprived of love.

I followed the always exiting European soccer game (together with 100‘s of millions of TV-spectators around the globe) between Real Madrid and Barcelona the other night and it’s aftermath. Then I read your Reflections of the Human Conditions with great interest to see if I could find at least a farfetched answer to why certain key individuals behaviors, often predictable, turn out the way they do.

Professional soccer is filled of neurotic (some on the border  of psychotic) managers, trainers and players of which quite a few are earning between 10 and 20 million dollars a year which inflate both their egos and the superhuman performance expectations on them. When things do not turn out the way, the fanatic fans expect, no wonder that a repressed player after a few mistakes loses his control. As a response on a feeling of being worthless and unloved one of the players started to do evil things to his opponents. He performed in a few minutes, after having made a match crucial mistake, dirty tackles, stepped on a downed opponent’s hand and made an attempt to simulate to have been receiving an unfair impact of another opponent to his face.

Aterwards, he said (which he presumably was forced to do by his club) that what he had been accused of doing (in front of a few hundred million TV-viewer) he would never do to an opponent. He had not knowingly tried to damage his opponents. Nobody believes him, only the fact that so much money is in play for his club, Real Madrid, does that they close up around him and put the lid on.

The player in question has experienced a number of similar situations over the last few years. His behavior in a losing situation is very  predictable. His present trainer and responsible (being a Portuguese-speaking compatriot) is a “win at all cost BPD neurotic” with all the classic signs of having a need to compensate for loss of love in a crucial period of his life, which has made the player an easy victim for his psychotic pressure.

Even if I hated his behavior on Wednesday night, I feel sorry for the player, understanding the pain which causes his short circuits. They are not that far apart from what you have described about what has happened to a number of serial murderers. However, the multimillion-audience on the air, of which many are young kids, certainly do not forgive him for not having got enough love before or after his birth... And to advise him to go looking for the feeling of no love won’t be easy with his present trainer, José Morinhou.

Jan Johnsson