Word: chess
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Manhattan's Dr. Ariel Mengarini, a nonanalytic psychiatrist, asserts that the typical amateur chess player has had a formal education and has a job that does not come up to his intellectual capabilities. He needs the kind of mental workout that he gets in chess. Equally important, to Mengarini, is the struggle. "But the beauty of chess," he says, "is that the rules are clear-cut. If you win, no one can take away your victory. In life, most of your wins are not clear-cut. If you've lost, there's nothing to do but shake...
Another non-Freudian, Dr. Kurt Alfred Adler, son of the late Alfred Adler and an exponent of his school of individual psychology, goes further. "To me," he says, "chess is a game of training in orientation for problem solving, not only in strategy and tactics and plane geometry, but in learning to use the pieces as a cooperative team. I would put little emphasis on the elements of hostility and aggression, and dismiss completely the sexual symbolism. The players are trying to overcome difficulties, and while they are also trying to attain mastery, the game is a form of social...
...Adler. In collective societies such as Russia, the player plays the board rather than his opponent. Competitiveness becomes more pronounced in Western Europe and is rampant in the U.S. Whether a player plays the board or against his opponent becomes a finespun argument in the tens of thousands of chess games that are always in progress by mail. Biochemist Aaron Bendich, of Manhattan's Sloan-Kettering Institute, summarizes his motivation: "I play as an intellectual exercise, and I don't see my opponent as an adversary. But there is an adversary-and that...
...Chess," said Goethe, "is the touchstone of the intellect." To many better-than-average players, a well-played game embodies something more: it is a work of art, owing as much of its beauty to imagination and creativity as to the exercise of intelligence. However it is regarded, and however long or short a time the current worldwide flurry of interest in chess persists, the game will go on. It has endured for 1,400 years, and will outlive all the theorists. ∎Gilbert Cant
With his nimble mind and ability to manipulate numbers, he might have become a nuclear physicist or a chess master. Instead, James Joseph Ling became the quintessential conglomerator. In the roaring '60s he created a company that eventually ran up sales of $3.75 billion a year from products as diverse as jet planes and hamburgers. By 1969, Ling-Temco-Vought of Dallas was the 14th largest industrial enterprise in the U.S. In 1970, with LTV stock crashing and bankers hounding him for huge debts, Ling's own directors booted...