Football: the great passion of the Brazilian people. A study of Jungian Symbolic Psychology

Abstract

Based on the theory of Jungian symbolic psychology, the author interprets football as a powerful structuring system with a high pedagogic potential to structure individual and collective consciousness with the alterity archetype. This structuring capacity of football became a collective ritual at practically no cost capable to elaborate creatively aggression, competition, and ambition to win and, at the same time, coordinate the ethical function to absorb the frustration of defeat within the affectionate union of the team. According to the author, the interaction of these emotions expressing exuberantly the matriarchal archetype with the rules coordinated by the patriarchal archetype leads the game to the passionate experience of the archetypes of alterity and of totality.