Word: chess
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Ernest Jones, official biographer of Sigmund Freud, seemed to agree with those sentiments when he wrote in 1930: "Chess...is a play substitute for the art of war." But in the same essay, The Problem of Paul Morphy, which discussed the paranoia that beset the American chess prodigy of the 1850s, he also moved Freud's much-debated interpretation of Oedipus onto the chessboard. Morphy, in Jones' somewhat questionable theory, had to sublimate a strong Oedipal urge to "kill the father." His own flesh-and-blood father was already dead, but Morphy had a surrogate father, Howard Staunton...
Since Jones' essay, the psychoanalysis of chess has been increasingly preoccupied with sexual symbolism. Said Menninger about chess players: "Silently they are plotting (and attempting to execute) murderous campaigns of patricide, matricide, fratricide, regicide and mayhem." A great chess player, Manhattan's Reuben Fine, has popularized a psychology of chess studded with phallic symbols, spattered with anal-sadistic impulses and imbued with latent homosexuality. In successive rounds, Fine once defeated Botvinnik, Reshevsky, Euwe, Flohr and Alekhine, and drew with Capablanca. When Fine switched his major interest from chess to psychoanalysis, the result was a loss for chess...
Such symbolism aside, the motives and methods of chess players are as varied as their personalities. Even among the small number of men who have been world champions in this century there have been polar differences. Emanuel Lasker, title holder from 1894 to 1921, was a philosopher, mathematician and thoroughgoing "square" by most psychological standards. His satisfactions from chess appear to have been entirely intellectual. Cuba's Jose Capablanca (champion from 1921 to 1927), who gave up the orderliness of a projected career in engineering to become a chess giant and his country's hero, enjoyed competition...
Since 1948, all of the world champions have been Russians-from Mikhail Botvinnik (three times) to Boris Spassky. Their personalities, temperaments and styles of play reflect not only East-West cultural differences, but also the peculiar status of chess in Communist countries. While chess is merely a game for the Russian masses, it is a profession or at least a second profession for the Soviet chess masters, who may also be engineers or physicists. Both teaching and play are state-supported, and grand masters get good pay and high honors. So when a grand master competes outside Russia...
Among the Russian champions, Spassky represents the calm, collected and efficient competitor that Reuben Fine includes in the "non-hero" class, able to do well in fields other than chess. Fine also notes that the easygoing Spassky is a depressive personality, perhaps because in childhood he endured the siege of Leningrad and spent some years in an orphanage. Spassky's father left the family when Boris was very young, and the future champion was raised by his mother. Fischer, too, was deserted early in life by his father and raised by his mother. Her name, incidentally, was Regina...