Alysa Liu won gold by becoming a friend to herself first, not by learning new jumps.

Mikaela Shiffrin used reason as governance, not control, to end an eight-year drought.

Ilia Malinin's struggle was constitutional, not technical: governance overwhelmed by extraordinary stress.

The same three patterns show up in clinical practice, far from any Olympic ice.

Plato was a wrestler. The name itself means "broad"; a nickname, though whether it referred to his build, his forehead, or his wrestling stance is debated. For the Greeks, athletic competition was never separate from training in self-governance.

I watched the Milan Cortina Games this month and saw three patterns of constitutional psychology that I’ve also seen in some of the people I’ve worked with.

Constitutional Renovation: Turning the Whole Psyche

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. She put it all on her terms: she would choose the music, the choreography, the costumes. They did not set a goal of winning gold.

On February 19th, she skated to Donna Summer and won: the first American woman to take individual figure skating gold in 24 years. Aly Raisman, the Olympic gymnast who now speaks on sports psychology, called the moment “healing” and said it proved that when an athlete loves something and also loves herself, anything becomes possible.

Raisman just articulated Republic 443d. 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). Liu did not learn new jumps during her time away. She turned her whole psyche, which is exactly how Socrates describes real education: not putting knowledge into people who lack it, but “turning the whole body” from darkness toward light (518c-d).

She did what I call constitutional renovation. She dismantled an organizing principle that had made skating into something she endured and rebuilt it until it became an expression of who she actually was. The technical excellence was there the whole time, waiting for governance worthy of it. I’ve seen this in my practice: The client who has mastered a context that is destroying them. The career they are brilliant at, but which leaves them empty. The relationship where they have become expert at managing someone else’s chaos. In these cases, the therapeutic work is not adding skills. It is a constitutional renovation.

The Logistikon at Work: Governance Before Performance

Mikaela Shiffrin tells a different version of the same story. One hundred and eight World Cup wins. Olympic gold in 2014 at 18. Then, eight years without an Olympic medal: Beijing was six events entered, three not finished, zero medals. Her father died. She dealt with PTSD from racing crashes. In Milan, she placed fifteenth in one event, eleventh in another. The slalom was her last chance.

Three days before that race, she wrote what amounted to a journal entry: fear, adrenaline, “the potential for criticism and backlash.” Then: “Still, when the countdown started, I pushed.” She won by 1.5 seconds. “The wonderful thing about this day,” she said, “was that I felt proud before it happened.”

That sentence is clinically precise. The constitutional order preceded the performance. She used what Plato calls the logistikon (reasoning faculty) not to suppress the fear, but to govern it: name the competing forces, organize them under a principle, carry that order down the mountain. This is what I watch for in my office: the moment a client moves from being overwhelmed by competing internal demands to being able to say what is happening and choose to act from an integrated position.

When the Politeia Fractures

Then there is Ilia Malinin. Twenty-one years old, the only person to land a quadruple axel in competition. He led after the short program. In the free skate, he landed one quad, and then everything collapsed: He bailed on his signature jump, doubled a planned quad, and fell twice. His skill did not disappear between programs. What gave way was his auto politeia (self-governance): the internal ordering that holds competing psychological forces together under pressure.

Plato describes something like this in the democratic psyche of Books VIII and IX: too many forces vying for the throne without a stable governing principle. In Malinin's case, it may have been anxiety and the sheer urgency of the moment overwhelming his concentration rather than competing desires. But the pattern is the same. Under ordinary conditions, the governance holds. Raise the stakes high enough, and every fault line opens.

I’ve seen this often. The high-functioning person whose coping works until it does not. The executive who manages enormous complexity at the office and falls apart when a relationship ends. The veteran who holds it together for years and comes undone over something that looks like nothing. This is not a skill failure. It is a constitutional vulnerability, and recognizing that changes the intervention: You build governance, relationship with self, not techniques.

Choosing the Middle Life First

Team USA had its best Winter Games in 76 years: 33 medals, 12 gold, including both hockey teams. But the numbers are not the point. In the Myth of Er, Plato describes the wise psyche choosing “the middle life” and fleeing “the excesses in either direction” (619a). Liu and Shiffrin did not choose gold medals. Liu said she did not need one to validate her decisions. They chose constitutional health first. The medals followed.

The question Plato would ask each one of us is the same one these Games answered: Who are you when the whole world is watching? The answer depends on whether you have become a friend to yourself first.

Plato. Politeia. (1969). Plato in Twelve Volumes, Vols. 5 & 6 translated by Paul Shorey. Harvard University Press.

Sunde, C.H. (2025). Platonomy: Ancient Wisdom for the Modern Self. Archway Publishing.

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