Laura Aliberti: Psychology, Psychoanalysis, and Running
Psychologist and runner explains how body and mind integrate through sports and how running helps manage frustration.
Laura Aliberti shares her journey across psychology and sports, highlighting running as a space for community and self-discovery. The psychoanalyst explores the connection between psyche and soma, showing how the moving body reflects emotional processes and inner limits.
Our relationship with physical movement often starts unassumingly, taking on new meaning over a lifetime. For psychologist and psychoanalyst Laura Aliberti, sports have been a constant since childhood across disciplines like swimming, practiced without the pressure of high performance or early specialization. Street running entered her life around 2015 and 2016 through traditional races in Piracicaba, São Paulo, alongside her parents and then-boyfriend—now husband—becoming a meaningful family bond.
Over the years, the practice evolved into a more structured routine. In 2023, Laura joined a running coaching group while still in Piracicaba and later adopted the same approach when moving to Campinas, São Paulo. Joining a running club served as a gateway to building connections and creating a supportive social circle, especially among women, underscoring the unifying power of the sport.
Integrating psyche and soma in running
Throughout her academic training, her perspective on sports deepened. Laura highlights that psychology allows us to see mind and body not as separate entities, but as an integrated whole—psyche and soma. Far from being a purely mechanical exercise, running reflects the runner's emotional state, acting as a barometer for identifying levels of anxiety, mental overload, and burnout.
Sports also serve as a practical space for confronting limitations and developing frustration tolerance. Training inevitably exposes failure and fatigue—core themes in psychoanalytic theory, which explores concepts of lack and desire. In her view, running helps organize thoughts and acknowledge one's own physical and mental boundaries on both good and bad days.
From clinical listening to Winnicottian psychoanalysis
Her career choice in psychology grew out of volunteer work, cultural exchanges, and community listening experiences. While she began her therapeutic practice within the behavioral approach—centered on stimulus, response, and behavior management—Laura found her calling in psychoanalysis, focusing on the work of British psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott.
While behavioral models analyze contingencies and tasks, psychoanalysis explores the unconscious, dreams, and the individual's personal history. When running, that historical baggage doesn't stay behind: the body carries anxieties, memories, and unconscious processes straight onto the pavement. For Laura, understanding this dynamic broadens our view of how sports shape and transform everyday mental health.