It will soon be three years since we discovered new forms of comfort in the face of unbearable bereavement situations. “Luckily mom has no longer had to experience the pandemic…”, we said. We used to think things like that, in the same way that now it consoles us that mom has been spared the embarrassment of the bribes from Barça.
Mine was a good fan of the club. If she was ever lucky enough to see the team play in situ when she was young, she did not hesitate to celebrate each goal as if it were the last, something that surprised the men who crowded the stands, starting with her own husband.
For a generation of women who in childhood endured the horrors of war and then the corset of Francoism and social scrutiny, soccer could be a secret celebration of life and the human drive, an intimate expression of freedom.
For many people, the Barça game was more than bread and circuses. It was a shot of illusion and joy against a reality as dense as cement. But, above all, it served as a screen for unresolved subconscious traumas.
The Hungarian-Canadian doctor Gabor Maté, very fashionable in the Anglo-Saxon world, defends that all addictions are rooted in trauma. Trauma, he says, structures life. And healing it requires observing the truth.
He himself carries the fear of having been abandoned at eleven months by his mother in Nazi-occupied Budapest. She, a Jew, found refuge in a Swiss embassy home that, overcrowded, became unsanitary. The child fell ill and, to save him, the mother went out into the street and gave him to the first Christian who passed by.
In The Myth of Normality Maté explores trauma from both a psychological and a social perspective. And he observes essential ideas such as that, in his case, the trauma is not that his mother gave him to a strange person, but the meaning that she gave him, the internal wound that he is not loved or wanted .
We will have to see what meaning Barça lovers/addicts give to their new trauma: the one that causes the whole world to believe that it was not the beauty of their game that led them to victory, but a corrupt hand arbitration smeared by the directive.
