Chess as Mood Therapy in Hospital

Associated Press reported that chess is being used at Siteman Cancer Center and Washington University School of Medicine.


Here's its short news article, 2009:

"A chess-playing program designed to brighten the lives of cancer patients and their caregivers will be offered soon in St. Louis. The Siteman Cancer Center at Barnes-Jewish Hospital and Washington University School of Medicine will offer 'Chess for Life' beginning Oct. 9. The program was developed in conjunction with the Chess Club and Scholastic Center of Saint Louis.

'Chess for Life' was inspired by Siteman Cancer Center patient Jim Corbett, who found that his mood improved when he began playing chess. Corbett died last December. The program is a tribute to him."

Chess Therapy for A Young Intellectual

One time, Mark, an Italian university-educated young man visited me in the hospital. He's hungry for chess practices and wanting to inquire about chess therapy. When he arrived, I asked him to join my group session and share a bit about himself. After a short conversation, he's truly a "philosopher" guy immersed in heady ideas and abstract concepts... But, most of all, he was seeing me for therapy. Chess therapy, in particular. Chess did fit him well. As author Ken Younos put it, "It is good therapy for philosophers to play chess."

Life Is A Kind Of Chess

If you've read my previous posts, you'll observe that I tend to compare life to a game of chess. In chess, it's important to understand that it is you who control the pieces - how they move or what happens to them.

Rather than blaming your opponent or thinking of genes, noise, or other distractions, you're the one called to be in control and responsible for your moves to reach your goals.

This is so in real life. Our psychological and emotional well being depends on how much we understand that we're the ones responsible to control our own feelings, thoughts, and behaviors.

"Nonresponsibility" by blaming or passing on to others the moves we need to make is a favorite pastime! I believe, if one who is in therapy or great distress can establish the thinking that he's responsible for anything that happens or does not happen in his life, then he begins to go far on his journey.

Study how you move, how you feel and think, and what you do. See every defeat as an opportunity for growth. Focus on things that will help you win and reach your goals for balance and well being.

Bobby Fischer and Me

People do get addicted. And the reason why they can't just quit is because they get a kind of relief - temporarily. Turning to material, visible, or concrete things somehow work to make the pain of unmet needs go away. Unfortunately, they're not reliable. They change and we can know what to expect.

 I played chess in the elementary school with the late American world champion Bobby Fischer as my "hero." I studied his games, which helped in my championship tournaments. An interesting thing about my childhood game was that it was as if my personality gets transformed once I imagined myself playing like Bobby. Uhmm, enough for my childhood days!

Going back to Bobby, I knew from his biography that he came from a materially deprived and emotionally abusive home life. His father abandoned him, his mother, and sister while he was almost still an infant. His mother was a devoted parent but could be too domineering for Bobby. In his adolescent and adult years as a world-class chess grandmaster, he'd defy his mother and the world chess establishment. Throughout his later years during his early forced retirement, he would curse and lambast the United States and the whole of Jewish race in world media. He isolated himself, ran away as a "fugitive" from his homeland, and lived as a lonely exile in Reykjavic, Iceland.

On his deathbed at age 64 (chess has 64 squares!), Bobby Fischer was with psychiatrist Dr. Magnus Skulason by his side. According to Dr. Skulason, Bobby told him his feet were aching and asked for a massage. Dr. Skulason narrated, "Responding to my hands on his feet, he said with a terrible gentleness, 'Nothing is as healing as a human touch.' " Those were Bobby's last words. Unfortunately, throughout his turbulent life, it seems that Bobby was never touched enough or often, if at all.

The tragedy in Bobby Fischer's life was that he was trying to medicate the pain of the difficulties of his upbringing that were not his own doing with chess and hostility against the world. His chess genius helped him cope during his youth and adulthood to become one of the world's greatest world chess champions. Eventually, in old age, his demons would return and he needed a bigger coping mechanism because his old "drug" wasn't working any more. But coping is not the same thing as solving the problem or pain.

I theorize that counseling and psychotherapy for Bobby Fischer at any stage could have changed him. Better still, the need for spiritual growth and healing was apparent in Bobby's life even earlier on to make it more permanently joyful and fulfilling. How easy it is to become addicted to physical things and believe they can substitute for our psychological, emotional, and spiritual well being. It happened in Bobby Fischer's life and it was so difficult for him to walk away and heal.

More on the PsychoBiography of Bobby Fischer at Amazon.

The Psychology of Chess

Dr. Karl Menninger, an aggressive Freudian therapist, once declared of his chessplay: "It seems to be necessary for some of us to have a hobby in which aggressiveness and destructiveness are given opportunity for expression, and since I long ago gave up hunting (because it is too destructive), I have found myself returning more and more to the most ancient of all games." Ernest Jones, a biographer of Sigmund Freud, agreed with such sentiment when he wrote in 1930: "Chess is ... a play substitute for the art of war."

Concerning chess, the famous H.G.Wells wrote: "There is a class of men—shadowy, unhappy, unreal-looking men—who gather in coffee houses, and play with a desire that dies not, and a fire that is not quenched. These gather in clubs and play tournaments...but there are others who have the vice who live in country places, in remote situations—curates, schoolmasters, tax collectors—who must need to find some artificial vent for their mental energy."

Benefits of Chess in Education

Research shows the effectiveness of chess in teaching thinking and enhancing the school performance of children.  Here's a collection of studies and papers on chess and education.

From Loneliness To Passion

You don't have to be a chessplayer to appreciate the psychological insights and life lessons in Dr. Frank Brady's recent book on former American world chess champion, Bobby Fischer. A lot of people experienced a life similar to that of Bobby Fischer. He could be one of those who may had been saved by psychological and spiritual healing. Take a look at how his story mirrors the deepest needs of humanity. His life is interesting but it's a tragedy. Lots we can learn from it though.