Chapter 11: A Polysemic Multivoiced Group Self: Attempts to Cultivate the Intuition of the Group

As seen in the previous chapters, working with athletes means working with teams and groups of athletes training, competing and developing together. Further, these groups tend to form certain ways or ¹ together with how to do things. Yet, the aim of this chapter is to explore the expansion of the self to entail the community self and how to cultivate the common externalization of the community’s self in the intuitive taking for granted behavior of the group/community. Thus, this is an expansion of the polysemic multivoiced self presented elsewhere (Bisgaard et al., 2024) allowing us to understand some dynamics of the group and propose potentially fruitful ways to cultivate the intuitive and automatized meaning-making process and thus behavior of the group—for example, when being under pressure in sports still having to perform. The aim of this chapter will then be to examine how to work with and seek to constitute the culture of the group. This is an essential aspect of working with sports. Here sport performance in sport is a collaborative project between individuals in a system of coaches, parents, athletes, physiotherapists, team managers, volunteers, and so on, engaging in more or less conscious dialogical processes of meaning both within individuals, between individuals in a sporting community and between communities that constitute a certain culture or here—a community self. Especially the notion of gestalt explosions and the inducement of gestalt explosions and the following meaning-making process will be of great importance in this chapter and will be attempted unfolded throughout this chapter.²