Handbook of Cultural Sports Psychology

Edited by:
Natalie Jancosek, Sigmund Freud University
Christian Højen Bisgaard, Bisgaard Performance

A volume in the series: Advances in Cultural Psychology: Constructing Human Development. Editor(s): Jaan Valsiner, Niels Bohr Professor of Cultural Psychology, Aalborg University.

In Press 2025

The desire of this volume is to approach sports and the athletic sphere through Cultural Psychology. The particular focus is on the grounds and necessity of Sports Psychology and the cultural psychological additions to this area.

Sports, especially competitive sports and performing arts offer us new arenas for studying and understanding human nature. Thus, the main characters of the chapters of this book are athletes who want to excel and achieve new heights through their personal devotion to their sports. To understand athletes’ abilities to reach excellence and to enhance our understanding of the constructive inherent in psychology and thus move beyond the reconstructive idiom in mainstream psychology we propose that sport is a cultural psychological phenomenon - therefore it needs to be studied as such to understand how these competitive sports environments allow the athletes to strive for excellence.

This volume depicts the historical development of sport and how this development makes both overt and tacit knowledge available to our meaning-making processes. Complementary, this volume investigates how sport serves as a medium for personal development in the sporting context as well as in everyday life, therefore it was important to elaborate both theoretically and practically on ideas and topics of the individual chapters with the help of the notion of dialogical negotiation of meaning in sport communities.

CONTENTS
Series Editor’s Preface—Bringing Cultural Psychology to the Domain of Sports: Practical Innovation of Theoretical Importance, Jaan Valsiner. Introduction: Sport as an Arena of Development of Personal Health, Personal Achievement, and Societal Game, Natalie Jancosek and Christian Højen Bisgaard. PART I: HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT OF SPORTS AS AN ARENA OF HUMAN DEVELOPMENT AND EVERYDAY LIFE. Sport as Life: Cultural Psychology of Goals-Oriented Striving, Jaan Valsiner. The Term “Athlete”, Henry “Sifu Slim” Kreuter. Sports Within the Dynamic Changes of Cultural Development, Natalie Jancosek. Value-Based Parenting: Parents as Key Meaning Making Structures for the Developing Person and Athlete, Janne R. Mortensen. After the Fall: Learning Resilience in Alpine Downhill Skiing, Lisa-Marie Geberth. PART II: PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT INEVITABLY EMBEDDED IN ATHLETE ECOLOGIES AND SPORT COMMUNITIES. Sport for Development: Learning From Cultural Psychology to Catalyze Community Development, Christian Højen Bisgaard. The Mediatization of Sport and Athletes, Marit Stub Nybelius. Dialectical Negotiation of Values and Goal Setting in Practice, Svend Aage Sørensen. Meaning Formation in Elite Sports Clubs: Development of Self-Esteem and Higher Performance, Kenneth Larsen. A Polysemic Multivoiced Group Self: Attempts to Cultivate the Intuition of the Group, Christian H. Bisgaard, Marc Antoine Campill, Enno von Fircks, and Jaan Valsiner. Making of the Top Performance: Existential-Humanistic Guidance in a Strictly Competitive World, Enno von Fircks. PART III: SPORTS AS AN ARENA OF CULTURAL DEVELOPMENT. What About Minimal Movement? A Cultural-Psychologic Observation of Sports-Culture Cultivation, Marc Antoine Campill. Between Sports and Art: Where Aesthetics Meets Athletics: Identifying the Characteristics and the Contributing Environment of Stress Experienced by Classical Ballet Dancers, Marina Yabuki-DiCorcia. More Than a Compromise: Inter-Relation of a New Cultural Sport, Marc Antoine Campill and Natalie Jancosek. Conclusion, Natalie Jancosek and Christian Højen Bisgaard. About the Editors.