Time Essay: Why They Play: The Psychology of Chess

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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 intercourse."

How much raw competitiveness enters into the game depends on the culture, says 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's me! If I lose and allow myself to get angry with my opponent, I am really projecting onto him the anger I feel with myself for having played badly."

"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