The ‘healthy minded’ and ‘sick souls’ in Sport?

I’ve recently gone back to reading William James, the American philosopher and psychologist whose classic work The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) I first encountered when exploring the spiritual dimension of running in my Master’s thesis 10 years ago. That time my interest was on considering how the sacred or transcendent dimension might manifest in running experiences for people who are not necessarily attached to any organised religion.  

I was reminded of James when recording the podcast with Sandra Meeuwsen where she talks about the dual nature of modern sport. The ‘bright’ and ‘dark’, the ‘positive’ and ‘negative’, and how we validate the other and sometimes refute the other. And these themes certainly links to my previous blogs where I am asking questions about positive and negative experiences in sport and their relation to meaning.

So to the point: one of key ideas in The Varieties is that James describes two religious ‘temperaments’ or outlooks on life: Healthy-mindedness and sick souls.

The healthy minded are ‘the happy ones’ who have a natural tendency to see the good in the world: ‘Cosmic emotion’ inevitably takes in them the form of enthusiasm and freedom (p. 79). As James continues, I mean those who, when unhappiness is offered of proposed to them, positively refute to feel it (…) [and] whose affinities are rather with flowers and birds and all enchanting innocencies, than with dark human passions… (pp. 79-80). When the healthy minded encounter the ‘dark side’ they refuse to accept its existence. James used ‘the Mind Cure’ movement as an exemplar of healthy mindedness that seems quite similar to positive psychology.  

And what about the sick souls? They have a deep sense that there is also a tragic, meaningless, dark or evil side of life. One of the examples in the book is Leo Tolstoy who, despite leading a successful life, found the world utterly meaningless.

James suggests that the sick souls are often unhappier, but are more in touch with reality than the healthy-minded. After all, the evil facts… are a genuine portion of reality; and they may after all be the best key to life’s significance, and possibly the only openers of our eyes to the deepest levels of truth (p. 163).

In sport, I think one of the examples of healthy mindedness could be positive youth development (PYD) ideology. In PYD, sport is considered as a context for young people to develop their character and skills to flourish and succeed in life. Most studies focus on documenting the positive developments that have been achieved (e.g., life skill development), and if negative developmental experiences are noted, they are often considered as faults in the coaching practice than can be solved with educating coaches.

What might ‘sick souled’ approach to sport look like, then? It would need to acknowledge that our (sport) lives can also be uncontrollable and unsuccessful, and that when human beings come together, tensions sometimes arise. Through sport, it is also possible to realise the loneliness, fragility and meaninglessness of human life and that our strivings lead to nothing. Perhaps some participants learn teamwork (a typical life skill), whereas others learn that there are some people who you should not trust. And so on.

I was not thinking of the sick souls and healthy minded when writing an article on life skills and existential learning in sport with my colleagues, but in retrospect, this distinction seems to capture some of what I was trying to say.

It would be interesting to explore further whether ‘sick souls’ and ‘healthy-minded’ also have different ways of finding meaning in sport.