Gladys Portugues (from Bronx, New York City), a sweet young lady at the BETTER BODIES GYM where the body building revolution began in 1981-82. I was there and we were friends. As she became well known, she somehow met (and married) Claude von Damme. Big mistake.

Western man idealizes productivity, the objects created and produced as a result of activity. Often, the desire to create becomes a compulsion. The self idealizes the fruits of action, so identifies with the wondrous objects created, that the self-forgets its own existence. Energy is externalized into objects, with subsequent diminished cathexis of the self. 

Western man comes into being as he creates objects testifying to his existence. The externalization of the self into things confirms his reality. The danger is that, in his hysterical activity, Western human beings forget the source of creation, devaluing the creator, deferring to the objects he has created.  The reality of the self becomes projectively identified with an object symbolizing the self.  Existence has been sacrificed in the name of objects.

In projective identification, the ego "splits" into two: a part of the self relocates into an idea or object mentally represented as external to the self. Body-building has the purpose of annulling projective identification, disavowing the ego's tendency to externalize itself into objects, seeking to return to the physical source of existence (Freud: "The ego is first and foremost a body-ego").

Body-building is an effort to reclaim libido for concrete existence; prevent libido from being "drained off" into culture.  Creativity and productivity may reflect a tendency toward self-castration--displacement of libido into objects testifying to the existence of the self--draining the self of its own cathexis.  

The "phallic phase" means a focus upon the organ of reproduction: The ego is reproduced, duplicated (like a Xerox copy) in objects that symbolize the ego and testify to the self's existence.  Body-building is a defense against the phallic phase: cathecting the entire organism--symbolizing of the unity of the self.  

The phallic phase externalized the ego to create "hard objects" that do not disintegrate as quickly as s human body; objects that "live on."  Body-building seeks return to the source of existence (the place where life and death  occur), relocating  existence within one's musculature.

The "physical fitness revolution" (which began around 1980) manifested disillusionment with culture and social life as a source of stability and an effort to find a new place of stability--locating the self in a place from which it cannot be separated. Ideas come and go, relationships occur and dissolve, one may live in place and then another, but one's body is present wherever one is.
 
Focusing on the body means the self is unified with its self: You exist where you are, as a unity and cannot be separated from your self.  Body-building means that the self is no longer located in an idea, diffused throughout the world: The experience of the muscle-system binds the self closely to its self.

Long-distance running, like body-building, represents a concentration of the self and libido within a narrow sphere of reality. George Sheehan, in Running and Being, described how he rediscovered his self in his body; how he "scraped away" the illusions of social existence discovering the core of being in physical effort and experience.  

He describes the "loneliness of the long-distance runner"--the experiences of the self as a solitary, unified entity. What appears to have occurred for Sheehan is that the intensity of proprioceptive stimulation, the energy and effort required to run, made it impossible him to escape the concrete experience of existence. 

The task of running a long distance is so arduous and all-consuming--so entirely experiential--that conceptions of existence, images and fantasies about the self--drop away.  One can't think about the past or dream about the future. The totality of one's libido are concentrated within the body and brought to bear upon the task at hand.

By contracting existence, focusing all psychic energy within the space of one's body. one intensifies existence, overcomes the tendency toward fantasy and mental diffusion. The athletic experience permits the individual to drop the idea of existence (existence as a "social construction") and to equate existence with the inescapable presence and unity of one's own body and will.