Putting the Game on the Couch

...Lasker is widely regarded by authorities as having advanced the art of the unbalancing technique, the direct opposite of the clarifying tactic...

...While some may find material for psychological study here, Cock-burn's effort suffers from a failure to break new ground...

...In analyzing the madness of Paul Morphy, the first American world champion (1858-62), Jones offers still another arguable theory...

...Yet even he concedes that Capablanca was a notorious ladies' man, dubbing him the "Don Juan of Chess...

...His documentation for this comes from, of all things, a passage out of a Frances Parkinson Keyes novel...

...I would have to admit that doing nothing except pushing little carved figures around a square board for 10 years could cause one to develop an odd outlook on life...

...Cock-burn's explanation is even shakier...

...Surprisingly, in light of Cock-burn's underlying premise, there is no mention of Harry Nelson Pills-bury, the American who came closest to the world championship in the era between Morphy and Fischer, and who died at the age of 33 in a sanitarium...

...And since chess is an obsessive game, some players become overwhelmed by the symbolism and their own psychic tension, resulting in a pronounced emotional disturbance...

...He is far more capable than previous chess-psychology researchers of making apparent sense out of often contradictory data...

...Morphy's problems began, he contends, when he was ridiculed as "a mere chess player" by a Louisiana belle...

...To be minimally consistent, Fine would have to show that this master's thirst for clarity also masked a degree of misogyny...

...It lacks originality, and Cockburn occasionally tends to play fast and loose with the facts...

...Thus when Bobby Fischer burst onto the front pages two summers ago with his strange actions, the media had a ready explanation: Bobby was another typical chess neurotic...

...Korchnoi arrived seven minutes after the official starting time for one game, a la Fischer...

...Yet it appears to be universally accepted that a passion for this intellectual contest tends to warp the brain-a number of the game's luminaries throughout history having exhibited somewhat bizarre behavior...

...Imagine how seriously an equivalent discussion of baseball (the sadomasochism of the catcher, the repressed voyeurism of the coach...

...Soviet chess hegemony, Taylor proffered, stems from an endemic Russian paranoia...

...Acceptable doctrines, though, should be made of stronger stuff...

...But if you have never read Ernest Jones or Reuben Fine on chess you may find it titillating, and the brief survey of the game's treatment in literature is mildly refreshing...

...The counsel that was provided had less to do with board strategy than with what the Russians call the "overall struggle": Karpov wanted play to begin as late in the afternoon as possible so as to tire Korchnoi, 20 years his senior...

...No master has ever been known to be a father-killer or homosexual-therefore proving everything is sublimated, I guess...

...Catch 22...

...This is traceable, he says, to Morphy's frustration at failing to meet and defeat the leading British contender of the time, Howard Staunton...

...And when Karpov took to wearing the same tie-a gift from an American admirer-several days in a row, Korchnoi countered by donning an identical one...

...Look back and you will find that the Americans reigned supreme in the 1920s and '30s, the German-speaking peoples at the turn of the century, the English and French in the 1800s, and those old psycho-pathological rascals, the Italians and Spanish, during the Renaissance...

...Perhaps the theory only works with Romance languages...

...Fine examines the case of Emanuel Lasker, world champion from 1894-1921, and maintains that his strategies reveal an aversion to women common among chess players...

...Significantly, too, in developing their construct of game-as-family-drama, the theoreticians have overlooked the situation in Russia, home of probably half the world's chess players...

...With the king representing the father and the queen the mother, different strategies are seen as an acting-out of family dramas...

...There the queen is not a queen but an asexual ferzh, a kind of neuter counselor...

...When Anatoly Karpov and Viktor Korchnoi held their recent match to determine an unwilling Bobby Fischer's next opponent, for example, each had a private psychologist working overtime...

...But Staunton was past his prime when Morphy became ill, and surely the American's victory over the previous champion, Adolph Anderssen, far outweighed any trauma not playing Staunton might have caused...

...His book, however, merely provides an extensive digest of Jones, Fine, the excellent organizational history Soviet Chess by D. B. Richards, and a few pieces of chess-oriented fiction such as Nabokov's The Defense and Stefan Zweig's The Royal Game...

...Also neglected is Aron Nimzovich, a revolutionary theorist of the '20s who used to stand on his head in free minutes during playing sessions, and who once became hysterical because his opponent "threatened" to smoke a cigarette in the middle of a match...

...The other prominent treatise taken up in Idle Passion is Reuben Fine's 1956 essay, "Psychological Observations on Chess and Chess Masters.' Fine, who now says the essay was not intended for the layman, is both a psychiatrist and a grand master who was ranked as one of the four or five top chess competitors shortly before World War II...

...Post schach, ergo propter schach...

...Psychosis may not be an advantage in business or the arts, the Englishman added, employing much the same kind of analysis that Cock-burn has drawn together, but it can make you a hell of a board man...

...Nevertheless, it strikes me as a bit unfair that a number of respected psychiatrists and psychologists have latched on to chess as a fertile ground for Freudian interpretation-aand worse, that reasonable people accept their views...

...author, "The Great Chess Tournaments and Their Stories" In Eastern Europe, especially in the Soviet Union, "sports psychology" is practiced quite seriously-perhaps most of all among master chess players...

...I suppose Idle Passion is not a bad book...

...His main interpretation primarily involved implications of sublimated patricide and homosexuality...

...or contract bridge would be taken...

...The most noted pursuer of queen-less endgame play was Jose Capablanca, Lasker's title successor until 1927...

...It is perhaps no accident," Fine writes, "that the two opening variations which bear his name, both involve an unusually early exchange of queens...

...That few enthusiasts would buy this hypothesis is to Cockburn further evidence of its validity...

...that is, to clarify the situation he gets rid of women...

...But all this does not seem to concern Village Voice columnist Alexander Cockburn...

...Similar antics have never figured quite as prominently in Western matches...

...In a London Sunday Times article about 12 years ago, British historian A.J.P...

...Without getting into the question of whether paranoia helps promote pawns, the reality is that Russian dominance in the game has only existed since the end of World War II...

...Moreover, only one of the two variations Fine mentions is named for Lasker, and in that instance the controversial exchange of queens applies to a sub-variation rarely played...

...In Idle Passion he brings together-indeed, extensively digests-much of the work that has been done in the scientific community on the game, and he briefly surveys its treatment in literature as well...

...He is considered the most respected modifier of Jones' approach...

...Taylor proved that the reason the Russians are so good at chess is not the unlimited government financial support for the game, or the centuries-old Russian addiction to it, or the sheer number of players in the country...

...Aside from the questionable logic, the observation contains serious factual errors...

...Chess was first put on the couch by Ernest Jones (an avid player himself during his later years), in a 1930 address to the British Psychoanalytical Society...

...For chess players, whatever the facts to the contrary that they may marshal, are automatically suspect...