Using my clinical experience in the world of high-level tennis, I will study adolescent players’ relation with eroticism and auto-eroticism through certain bodily and muscular movements that are repeated and sometimes associated with physical and emotional pain, in order to show the aspect of female masochism in this intensive practice of the sport. To shed light on the kind of masochism first theorized by Freud in 1924, I will try to make a distinction between the enjoyment and pleasure that may be experienced by the adolescent player who engages in tennis at a high level.

Adolescence, 2014, 32, 2, 331-343.