To Di World : Jamaican soccer,poiesis and post-colonial transformation

Abstract

This article presents a case study of an innovative culturally based therapeutic approach using collective poiesis to improve the functioning of a youth sports team in Jamaica. In recent decades, Jamaica has endured high levels of violence and corruption, and has been ranked among the top four countries in the world in terms of murder rate per capita. We conjecture that a high prevalence of personality disorder linked to the legacy of slavery and colonialism often impedes Jamaicans from achieving success in diverse fields, including sports. Psychological interventions in the preparation of football teams are a novelty, and have been used mainly to enhance global team performance or individual player skill. The use of psychological interventions to address personality disorder psychopathology on the soccer pitch has not been reported. Psychohistoriographic cultural therapy (PCT) integrates psychological perspectives with a dialectic method of historical analysis and uses collective poiesis as a vehicle to translate insights through an embodied cognitive restructuring process. Two workshops were carried out with a high school football team using PCT techniques. The process of dialectic reasoning engaged their collective ideas and insights to establish a psychic centrality that was expressed in poetic form to illustrate the pathologies of the group in an emotionally safe and psychologically acceptable narrative. This poetic narrative of the group's psychic centrality counters the personality disorder psychopathology caused by the lingering intergenerational wounds of slavery, colonial oppression and collective trauma.

Keywords

psychohistoriographic cultural therapy sports psychology performance enhancement collective poiesis school-based interventions

Introduction

Usain St. Leo Bolt must be regarded as one of the world's best known and most celebrated sprinters; having won the gold medal for the 100- and 200-m sprints and the 4 × 100-m relay at three consecutive Olympic Games (2008, 2012 and 2016). He is widely considered to be the greatest sprinter of all time (BBC, 20 August 2016; Daily Mail, 2016; Robertson, 2016; Ronay, 2016). His now famous ‘To Di World’ victory pose is known to many as the ‘lightning bolt’ – a pun on his name and his speed. Jamaicans know that ‘To Di World’ was a popular Jamaican dancehall movement of the 1980s and 1990s that has its roots in reggae music, and was copied and immortalized by the sprinter (Gray, 2017). ‘To Di World’ represents a contribution of Jamaica's poiesis to the world. In philosophy, poiesis is ‘the activity in which a person brings something into being that did not exist before’ (Polkinghorne, 2004).

It is a striking fact that Jamaica – the 37th smallest nation in the world, accounting for less than 0.05% of the world's population, with only 4,441 square miles for a total population of 2.8 million people – has made so many unique contributions: Usain Bolt, the world's greatest sprinter; Bob Marley, the first musical superstar from a developing nation with 20 million album sales; reggae, the musical genre originating in Jamaica; and Rastafari, an Afrocentric religious and political movement promoting Pan-Africanism. Jamaica has a history of athletic successes that date back to Arthur Wint and Herb McKinley in its Olympic debut in 1948 (Hickling, 2016). Unfortunately, Jamaica is also world-renowned for a myriad of social ills, including high levels of violence, with Jamaica ranked among the top four countries in the world in terms of murder rate (Krause et al., 2011). Jamaicans’ involvement in lottery scams was so rife that it prompted a congressional hearing in the United States (Collins & Casey, 2018). A survey suggested that just over 40% of the Jamaican population had evidence of a personality disorder (Hickling & Walcott, 2013a). The main correlate of maladaptive personality development was interpersonal conflict and the inability to manage authority structures (Hickling & Walcott, 2013b; Kerr, 1963). This population study provides the larger social context within which the case study presented in this article should be understood. Madeline Kerr (1963) argued that the sociocultural remnants of slavery and colonialism contributed to the personality difficulties evident in societal dysfunction. This argument was reiterated by Jamaican political sociologist, Carl Stone (1992), who suggested that the complex interplay of socioeconomic and power inequities, and the absence of sufficient resources are the legacies of slavery and colonialization that have led to weakened authority relations within Jamaican society.

Hickling (2016) suggested that these issues arise from the underlying structure of a racially prejudicial and socioeconomically oppressive system designed to maintain the hegemony of the plantation economies in developing nations that are economically dependent on metropolitan economies (Beckford, 1999). The perpetual cycle of structural economic dependence can be understood in terms of Galtung's (1990) description of the interplay of cultural, structural and direct violence. Cultural violence involves inducing beliefs of inferiority, hopelessness and despair that reinforce structural violence in societies built on corruption, discrimination and oppression. These processes foster interpersonal violence against stigmatized groups based on racism, colourism and class prejudice, which, in turn, results in personal and communal oppression (Lewis, 2015).

Jamaican soccer players ‘To Di World’

In 1998, the Jamaican soccer team the Reggae Boyz made it to the finals of the FIFA World Cup. Since that time, many Jamaicans have played professionally or semi-professionally for football clubs around the world, including in England, Scotland and Wales, the USA, Norway, Russia, Canada, Sweden and China. Some of the most talented players for the English national team have Jamaican heritage. The best known of these currently is Raheem Sterling who earned GBP 170,000 (US $223,000) per week while playing for Manchester City Football Club

Many Jamaican soccer players worldwide have emerged from Jamaican schoolboy football, which is organized into an elaborate competition that pits teams from urban and rural secondary schools against each other. The Manning Cup, a popular annual urban football competition among high school under-19 boys’ teams, is followed avidly by supporters in the parishes of Kingston St. Andrew and St. Catherine. Originating in 1909, it is a precursor to the adult semi-professional National Premier League, which provides an opportunity for some of Jamaica's talented young players to compete. The rural island football competition is called the DaCosta Cup. The winners of the Manning Cup competition meet the winners of the DaCosta Cup annually in a gladiatorial play-off for the coveted Olivier Shield.

The 1998 Jamaican Football World Cup team highlighted the impact that pathological behaviour has had on Jamaican's trajectory to success. Jamaica has always had a strong football culture. Its first World Cup qualifying team had a raft of talented players such as Ricardo Gardener, Onandi Lowe and Theodore Whitmore, who would all go on to have successful international careers in the sport. The most skilled and revered player was Walter ‘Black Pearl’ Boyd, whose popular moniker was equated by some with Brazilian football star Pele (Edson Arantes do Nascimento) (Weiniger, 2001). Despite being a talented player, Boyd was removed from the team because of his inability to control his disruptive impulses and harmonize with the team (Beckford, 2015; Earle & Davies, 1998; Robertson-Hickling, 2015).

From corner league soccer to World Cup

Although psychological interventions are widely used in the preparation of sports teams and individual players, these tools are used mainly to enhance either global team performance or individual player skill sets rather than the overall development of the individual (Slimani et al., 2016; Thelwell et al., 2010). However, the use of psychological interventions to address personality issues (personality being a core part of the individual's psychic structure) in an athletic team has not been well documented in the literature. In fact, there has been a shift away from personality as a whole to a focus on specific traits for success in the literature since the 1960s and 1970s (Allen et al., 2013).

In Jamaica and the Caribbean, interest in the application of psychological techniques and the usefulness of psychiatry and psychology in sports has been growing, with the establishment of teaching departments of sports psychology in many Caribbean universities, and the collaboration of psychologists with many sporting teams. Hickling (2015) discussed the role of psychiatry in Jamaican football, noting that with diminishing stigma towards mental illness, psychiatry and psychology have become increasingly accepted in Jamaica. Using case studies, Hickling illustrated a range of practical applications in recent decades, focusing on individual psychopathology, team building, social and international competitiveness, and in particular, the challenge of harnessing talent without team organization and cohesion. In a case study of an urban schoolboy soccer team in 1989, Hickling used a phenomenological approach to identify low group cohesion and disunity in the team, which he linked to the absence of fathers, and the presence of attachment disorders, abnormal power management and authority relationships, and narcissistic traits:

…The schoolboy football players in that group psychotherapeutic meeting were expressing rage towards these absent fathers in their life. And whatever love they had in their lives had soured into hate. They were grieving the loss of someone they wanted and needed to love… The adolescent boys on that team were experiencing unforgiving and inconsolable grief (Stolorov, 2013). Anybody who works with people's emotions in this country, especially working with young men, will acknowledge that this is something that we see often in this country that is riddled with conflict and trauma… The team members who were in my office had no respect for the captain of the team and little respect for the coach and would often question their authority. This was a football team of narcissists.... (Hickling, 2015, p. 166)

In the remainder of this article, we examine the development of a novel Jamaican model of psychological application to underperforming teams and individuals called psychohistoriographic cultural therapy (PCT) and cultural resilience. We present a case study of an underperforming schoolboy soccer team displaying individual aggrandizing behaviours while paradoxically having high levels of insecurity in their own skills, often attempting to mimic the playing styles of international footballers to the detriment of the team. The intervention involved the application of poiesis – in the form of group poetry making – to generate insights and behavioural transformation.

Psychohistoriographic cultural therapy

PCT, first developed in Jamaica in the 1970s, integrates psychological intervention with a dialectic method of historical analysis and uses poiesis as the vehicle to translate insights into cognitive restructuring processes that foster cultural resilience (Hickling, 2007). Led by a trained cultural therapist, the components of the PCT model consist of group activities termed circling, centring, culturing, cognitive catalysis and capacity building. Circling is a method derived from the kgotla – a large group circular communication system in found in many African societies.¹ Participants in the PCT process are invited to ‘find their centre’ by exposure to centring – a series of mindfulness (Kabat-Zinn, 2003), callisthenic and breathing exercises. These exercises are executed in a ritualized manner to facilitate attentional focus and grounding of the individual, followed by cohesion and synchrony of the group drawing on the Ubuntu African philosophy (Murithi, 2006). The centring exercise creates a collective hypnotic trance-like state (Jung, 1983) that aims to facilitate creativity.

This is followed by a process of dialogue in small or large groups, in which the group is encouraged to reflect on the power relations embedded in discourse (Bakhtin, 1992), drawing from the methods of dialogic cultural circles (Freire, 1972) and group ethnography (Geertz, 1973). The aim is to articulate opposing views in the service of knowledge generation.

In the process of culturing – using artistic activities to define values and mission (Carnwath & Brown, 2014) – the group is invited to explore the historicity of their culture (the ideas, customs and social behaviour of the group) through a series of musical, spoken word and dance exercises. Psychohistoriographic analysis is an exploration of collective history and experience from participants’ varied viewpoints that creates insight for change (Hickling 1989, 1992, 2007, 2009). This facilitates cognitive catalysis, a process of embodied cognition (Wilson & Foglia, 2017) that encourages each individual to create a thought and express it to the group in words and action, thereby transforming their cognition. This is expressed through collective poetry making, a key modality of PCT (Hickling et al., in press). Cognitive catalysis is inspired by in gestalt therapy, which is a person-centred approach to psychotherapy that often uses role-playing to aid the resolution of past conflicts (Perls et al., 1951). The final stages of PCT facilitate capacity building (Jones 1996; Landy 2008) within the group through a dramaturgic production and performance of the insights generated through PCT, including collective poems, songs, dances and skits.

Case study of PCT with a Jamaican high school football team

Management of a senior school (16–19 years of age) boys’ football team of 22 members engaged the authors in a service delivery contract to provide cultural therapy to address the team's difficulties in functioning. In lieu of payment, the authors requested permission to use the observations and material produced through the intervention for research purposes. The team’s management and members agreed to this use of the material. The school focuses on balanced education and places emphasis on both the academic and athletic development of its students. The school has a vibrant football programme, having won the rural island championship, the DaCosta Cup, seven times since its inception, and the all-island championship three times. The last championship period was 1998, which saw the school having a 16-year drought, and it was against this background that the team’s management requested psychological help for the 2014 DaCosta Cup team.

It was recognized that the team had the requisite talent and ability to be champions, but were not performing as expected in their matches. They lacked consistency and mental toughness when placed under pressure. The problems were divided into team-related issues and problems with specific key individuals – such as the captain and the key striker. The team problems were a lack of confidence in teammates and poor team cohesion. During important matches, the focus of the players was on showcasing individuals’ skills rather than working as a team to win the match. One contributing factor to this focus on individuals was the prospect of being recruited by scouts to play overseas. The team became disorganized when faced with their opponent taking the lead and the captain was not able to command the respect of the team. This led to conflict rather than compliance when he gave players instructions on the field.

The individual problems mainly involved two players who were very insecure. The captain was overly dependent on the coach and was unwilling to make decisions during play, which frustrated team members. The other team member with significant problems was the key striker. He had been described as one of the most brilliant forwards in schoolboy football for his ability to control the ball. However, he had very low self-confidence and tried to imitate his idol Christian Ronaldo in his mannerisms and style of play. This stifled his individual creativity and talent, as was evident in the team's loss to a competing school that was generally viewed as weaker.

The PCT process

A participant observer methodology was used in two PCT workshops conducted with the schoolboy football team described above. The 22 team members were adolescents aged 16–18 years. The therapist and co-therapist who are the co-authors of this article facilitated the discussion and created a dialectic diagram for analysis (Appendix 1), as well as capturing the psychic centrality of the group in the script. They then created and collated notes from both workshops. The two workshops were conducted at the school with the team members and team manager present. At the start of the session, the coach made an appearance but indicated that he had other matters to attend to and would not be able to join the session. The first session was well received by all the participants because they were eagerly awaiting their next match of the finals and were excited at the prospect of gaining an advantage over their opponents. The second workshop took place after their victory and was met with significant resistance during the setup. The methodology in both workshops was the same, but the focus was different: the first workshop addressed team problems, whereas the second addressed issues with an individual disruptive member.

The therapist instructed the team to arrange their chairs in a circle. The PCT technique is based on dialogic cultural circles and is well established as a forum for psychological group discussions. Circles were used to promote participation and dialogue through the negation of a culture of hierarchy. The therapist used circles sitting or standing and all activities were conducted in this manner. Participants were then guided through the centring exercises to promote affective regulation and mindfulness, as well as to consolidate a working space through deep breathing exercises and calisthenics to alleviate anxiety and build confidence. This was followed by a coordination exercise to improve alertness and focus. Group cohesion exercises started with singing the musical scale with Solfège syllables around the circle, and miming exercises that involved playing imaginary ball games. The centring exercises culminated in the group harmonizing in singing a collective note.

Culturing ‘poiesis’

Participants were then asked to introduce themselves and engaged in a dialectic reasoning session around their collective ideas – their words, made real as uttered sounds, and gathering power as the collective poetic connections capable of influencing emotions and actions/behaviours within the collective process (Hickling, 2019, unpublished). This process is described as originating in ‘the grounation circles’ of the Jamaican Rastafari Movement and ritualized as ‘word, sound and power’. Two poems were created, which are presented below stanza by stanza with the thematic insights (overstanding) gained by the group collective. Participants then engaged in a dialectic reasoning session around the selected antipodes of organization and disorganization, which was used to evaluate psychologically salient issues with the team. The therapist processed the discussion, capturing the essence in a diagram for analysis and then using poiesis, recorded the psychic centrality of the group resulting in the emergence of a script for a dramatic performance.

Workshop 1

2012 we start

Full of love inna we heart

We work hard so we confused

How come we Lose

No Discipline!!!

We wheel and come again ²

2014 focus on unity my friend

We win the cup

Glad bag bus ³ but then we lose focus

No prestige !!

When we hear the call

We stand tall

We have good players supporting one another So why we give up i-ah ⁴

No Concentration

The process started in 2012, at a time when the team was hardworking, loving and caring, but continued to lose their soccer matches. The group focused on individual performance, and ‘narcissistic’ communication and lack of discipline were identified as obstacles to group success. The team was determined to shift away from narcissistic and antisocial behaviours and came together with a singular focus to change course, with increased resolve on unity and discipline. As a result the team won the DaCosta Cup. Following this victory, however, they lost focus again and group cohesion deteriorated.

We give up to goals

Take the fight outa mi soul

Weh the leader deh

A think bout draw when a win we fi she

Turning Point!!

Lenny tek the team

We feel energized like a dream

We win the Francis cup

So why we still stuck

The psychic centrality that emerged from the poem was analysed by the therapist and presented to the team. The therapist identified that the pursuit of prestige can only come from working together, as other successful teams have shown. The presence of good players cannot translate into success unless they are able to empower and unify the members of their team and follow the coach. In the face of adversity, a leader is important to rally and motivate the team to push on and think beyond mediocre goals. The team has to be mentally prepared to deal with success as much as failure because complacency is also detrimental. The leader must identify and counter complacency in his teammates and encourage them. The role of the coach as a member of the team must be made clear as he has the experience and expertise.

Just not Tough enough

We Play good but lose

Discipline well cool

Anxious lose focus

We take the opponent fi fool

Lapse in Focus

We haffi get the leader

Him have to stop the lapse

But the captain himself a lapse

What a hataclaps⁵

Panic under pressure!!

This year leaders plenty

No fight and the love no empty

We nuh give up

So what the fuck!!

Listen Up!!

We not listening to coach

Full of our selves have too much GOAT

Hurry come up and forget the style

Only idiot nuh understand and nod with a smile

The team began to realize that it had no individual player who could stop the deterioration, as the captain himself crumbled under the pressure and all panicked. In the new cycle, they recognized that they had many leaders and they were able to resolve conflict with encouragement. However, the team recognized that, in spite of their determination and new resolve, they were impatient and failed to listen to the coach. As a result, with the pressure of a football match, they panicked and forgot the style they had learnt under the guidance of the coach. They began to gain insight into the way their lack of patience had to be tempered and they needed to submit to the authority of the coach. They were also beginning to appreciate that team members had to overcome the narcissism that emerges when they are not clear on the instructions they are carrying out, as a maladaptive coping mechanism to hide their lack of understanding.

The ‘reasoning’ highlighted that despite the team having individual players who were talented and hardworking, they were limited by the lack of organizational structure and discipline to work as a team. Once the team started having greater social cohesion, they had some successes. The team was able to sustain this because they had a level of resilience needed to counter their complacency and lack of leadership. The dialectic of a leader being individualistic versus team-oriented was discussed and the team decided that the ideal leader would be the person most likely to inspire and guide the team during play, rather than the person whose skill level was most impressive. This led to a discussion of power dynamics and the phenomenon of authoritarian versus submissive styles. Should a player follow the coach's instructions without question? Is the leader always right? These were some of the conflictual issues that had to be resolved through dialectical discussion. The dialectic resolution was that discipline was an intrinsic behaviour and that the individual had to choose to follow instructions; it was the responsibility of the leader or coach to provide clear and comprehensive communication and clarification when requested.

Workshop 2

The discussion started by the group was a dialectical analysis of one individual player's resistant behaviour using the excuse of being hungry. This set the agenda for the meeting to a discussion on perseverance versus apathy. The discussion explored the issue of purpose and established that, although there was a unified reason for being involved in the process, there were also individual reasons unique to each participant. The discussion also identified complacency with past achievements as an obstacle that threatened current goals. The success of the team depended on their ability as individuals and as a group to stay focused in spite of the challenges. The group recognized that their performance would only be judged on outcome and not on ability. Creation of the collective poems allowed the team members to be critical of themselves and each other while containing potential personality clashes and emotional injury.

We we deh yah fa Brain reset bring back the focus Rasta

We win the match but Saturday have another Brain Reset bring back the focus Rasta

We have to keep on the journey

Get everything together mentally

You want play bench or stay back yah so

So if yu want to win yu have to focus Rasta

Talk about hungry yu have mentally hungry

Work hard communicate and discipline

Stay humble and don’t get lost

Yes, you Star the match, but forget the past

Yu have to stay determined

Keep up the work

We know yu talented youth but don’t be a jerk

One man can win match Unity mek it work

One man can win match, Unity make it work

Cognitive catalysis of the poiesis

Cognitive catalysis occurs when participants use critical thinking to convert the script from the culturing/dialogue into a tangible expression of thoughts, feelings and actions in the group through the art forms of dance, drama, music and poetry. This process forces the group to confront and internalize insights distilled from the culturing process. The collective process facilitates the translation of individual insights to others. The poem created in the culturing was read by the therapist and the team together. The emotional resonance in the group as insights emerged was obvious and palpable. Rehearsal of the poem resulted in the emergence of poetic metre in the lyrics, which ignited individual and collective creativity as the psychic centrality connected the group. The group then used the rhythm of performance in the circle to harmonize the group. Next, as the rhythm became more and more synchronous, individual players would spontaneously enter the circle and improvise new dances and dub poetry recitations to the rhythm without breaking the harmony of the circle.

The capacity-building effects of this technique allowed the group to translate and concretize their insights into tasks and activities that could be observed by persons outside the group. These activities took the form of a dramaturgic play, dance and performance of the poem as a song. The group was able to learn the lyrics and commit them to memory. The dramatized poem was incorporated into a ritual preparation for their soccer matches. It also served as a metaphor for their new philosophy and style of play, in which the team would set the pace or rhythm on the football field with passes and ball possession. This process was translated into the ‘rhythm of play’. The poiesis became an effortless part of the team's game plan, as well as allowing individual players to showcase their skills while maintaining group harmony.

Discussion

This article has presented a case study of consultative group therapeutic work with a high school football team using PCT. The PCT process helped to elucidate the psychological and social problems that were adversely affecting group cohesion and sustained performance. These problems are common in many situations in post-colonial Jamaica, and PCT shifted the focus from individual issues to collective development. In so doing, it solved the problems of power and the complacency of team members. In other writing, we have suggested that the historical legacy of negative social narratives has resulted in self-sabotage in Jamaican society, which in turn has contributed to stagnation in the country's development. The PCT process uses the collective imagination and creativity of the group as a vehicle to contain intersubjective tensions reflective of the cultural context of the participants and uses dialectic analysis of these tensions to facilitate enhanced insight into maladaptive thought, emotion and behaviours, and create a road map for transformation.

The role of the therapist in this process is to observe the dynamics and insights of the group, structure activities to contain and reflect on the collective tensions, and facilitate elaboration and expression of the resultant insights by the group in poetic form. This process of poiesis uses words, sounds and power to establish the psychic centrality of the group and to illustrate the pathologies of the group in ways that are emotionally safe and psychologically palatable, and that counter maladaptive defence mechanisms that are usually triggered in response to such analysis or criticism. The poem that is created is owned by the collective and cannot be dominated or manipulated by a single individual – not even the therapist. This psychological reality is further reinforced when the poem is read by the group and there is explicit recognition of collective creativity and ownership. This projection of the shared group understanding or psychic centrality then promotes ‘overstanding’ (or insight) in the group, thus serving to negate social and psychological problems caused by the lingering intergenerational psychological, social and epistemological effects of slavery and colonial oppression.

Indeed if we [psychoanalysts] believe that the individual ought to be a social individual and that his or her happiness should have something to do with connections beyond the self and beyond intimate relations, we should perhaps be troubled by the fact that, too often, our work produces only healthier and happier versions of narcissism. (Layton, 2006, p. 110)

The PCT intervention uses poiesis as a core component of the culturing process. This technique creates a safe space for discourse on emotionally sensitive or volatile socio-emotional and political topics. The PCT process allows for psychic and intersubjective tensions to be created and utilized in the group that foster insight development among individuals and the team. In this case, the tensions motivated the team to engage the intrapsychic conflicts within the safe psychological space of the culturing process. The result was transformation of the psyche of the group, which was embodied in the creative poiesis with clear changes in the team from maladaptive to adaptive behaviour.

Notes

This project emerged from a request to CARIMENSA (the Caribbean Institute of Mental Health and Substance Abuse) from a high school to provide psychotherapeutic support for their football team. The agreement between the institutions involved service provision with the explicit understanding that, in lieu of financial remuneration, any material garnered from the experience could be used by CARIMENSA to improve the psychotherapy model. All publications were circulated through the principal and the team manager for approval and consent. The project was not funded by any external funders and all data remain the property of the authors of this paper.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to acknowledge the invaluable contributions to the execution of this project by Dr Hilary Robertson Hickling and Professor Jaswant Guzder as well as the other members of the CARIMENSA team. We also recognize the contribution of Mr Richard Palmer who has been dedicated to uplifting the lives of young men through sports.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iDs

Geoffrey Walcott

Frederick W. Hickling

Notes

Geoffrey Walcott, MB.BS, DM Psychiatry, is currently the consultant psychiatrist and clinical director for Psychotherapy Associates Ltd. He completed his education at the University of the West Indies (UWI), Mona, where he received his MB.BS degree in medicine and his DM in psychiatry. He was the co-principal investigator on a Grand Challenges Canada Grant O334-04 funded research project and received subsequent grants from the Ministry of Education transition to scale program for which he received the UWI Principal's Award for Most Outstanding Research Activity in 2015. He has published 19 peer-reviewed journal articles, and 2 book chapters focused primarily on community mental health, personality disorders and behavioural modification.

Frederick W. Hickling (1944–2020), CD, BSc (Anat.), MBBS, DM, FRCPsych (UK), FRSM, DLFAPA was educated in medicine and psychiatry at the University of the West Indies, Mona; anatomy at St. Thomas’ Hospital Medical School, University of London, and completed postgraduate training in psychiatry at the Royal Edinburgh Hospital, University of Edinburgh. Professor Hickling established community psychiatric services and pioneered cultural therapy and private psychiatric research in Jamaica, and he was instrumental in helping to shape policy for African Caribbean mental health in the United Kingdom. He was Professor of Psychiatry and Head, Section of Psychiatry, University of the West Indies Mona, and Executive Director of the University of the West Indies (UWI) Caribbean Institute of Mental health and Substance Abuse (CARIMENSA). His research interests were in African Caribbean mental health, schizophrenia, personality disorder, community psychiatry, psychotherapy, political psychology and cultural therapy. He had more than 100 articles and book chapters in peer-reviewed journals and authored 6 books. He was elected a Distinguished Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association in 2008, a Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists UK in 2011, and Emeritus Professor of Psychiatry at the University of the West Indies in 2011. He was awarded the Black Psychiatrists of America Andrea Delgado Award for Excellence in November 2010. He received the Order of Distinction (Commander) by the Government of Jamaica in August 2012.

Christopher A. D. Charles is a professor of political and social psychology in the Department of Government at the University of the West Indies (UWI), Mona, and operates a psychology consultancy in Kingston. He did doctoral training in psychology and political science and holds a PhD in psychology from the City University of New York. Before going to UWI, Dr Charles taught at John Jay College of Criminal Justice of the City University of New York, and the King Graduate School of Monroe College in New York. He is a psychologist at Psychotherapy Associates Ltd and a senior research fellow at the Caribbean Institute of Mental Health and Substance Abuse (CARIMENSA), UWI, Mona.

Appendix 1 Hickling's psychohistoriogram dialectic analysis of a schoolboy football team.

Table players’ views of the team’s performance from 2012 to 2018 (team evaluation)
Organised Hard working Determined Love	Working together	Skilled players Good ball possession Good team Communicate well Cover for each other Play as a team	Made all the finals Played well	Many leaders Organized Help each other Got this from coach/manager
2012–2013 Hate Discipline Complacency Disorganised	2013–2014 Every man for himself	2014–2016 Gave up two penalties Gave up early in the game Lack of concentration Lack of leadership	2016–2017 Only won one finals Indiscipline Lack of focus Anxiety No communication Failed to score Underestimated Opponents Poor leadership	2017–2018 Poor communication Didn’t follow instructions Panic Start fighting late Didn’t follow game plan

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