What Plato Would Have Seen at the Olympics

"Alysa Liu became the youngest national champion in American figure skating at 13. She made the 2022 Olympic team at 16. And she hated it. After Beijing, she retired, threw her skates in a closet, enrolled at UCLA, and spent 18 months figuring out who she was when nobody was giving her a score. Then she walked into a rink, landed a triple like she had never left, and called her coaches."

"Socrates defines justice for the individual psyche: a person should dispose well of what is properly his own, and 'having first attained to self-mastery and beautiful order, become a friend to himself': philon genomenon heauto (friend to himself). Aly Raisman called the moment 'healing' and said it proved that when an athlete loves something and also loves herself, anything becomes possible."

"For the Greeks, athletic competition was never separate from training in self-governance. Constitutional psychology patterns show up in clinical practice, far from any Olympic ice. Three patterns emerged: constitutional renovation through self-discovery, reasoned governance over control, and constitutional breakdown under extraordinary stress."

Constitutional psychology patterns observed in Olympic athletes mirror those seen in clinical practice. Alysa Liu achieved gold by reconnecting with herself and her love for skating after retirement, prioritizing self-mastery over competition goals. Mikaela Shiffrin ended an eight-year drought by using reason as governance rather than control. Ilia Malinin's struggles stemmed from constitutional overwhelm under stress rather than technical deficiency. These three patterns—constitutional renovation, reasoned governance, and stress-induced constitutional breakdown—reflect Platonic principles linking athletic competition to self-governance. The ancient Greeks understood athletic training as inseparable from developing psychological order and self-mastery, principles that remain relevant in modern performance and clinical contexts.

Read at Psychology Today