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Subject: [Off Topic] Chess, Suspiciousness, Paranoia

Author: Roger

Date: 15:36:46 01/19/00


Below are two article abstracts I came across today doing a search of the
PsycInfo Database at the American Psychological Association website. The first
article is more of a research article, and it finds that highly competitive
players are more suspicious, albeit with a small sample. The second is just
psychoanalytic trash, by Ernest Jones, a biographer of Freud. I posted the
second because I was not aware that Morphy succumbed to paranoia, but it
converges with the first in that aspect. Fischer comes to mind here, too.

Highly competitive people of all kinds, of course, are likely to be more
suspicious, but I was wondering if there might not be successful chess players
possessing a level of suspiciousness over and above what you would expect from
just competitiveness alone. The ability to smell an obscure positional or
tactical threat, for example, would seem to serve chess players very well...to
an extent. You have to wonder, for example, what with Morphy and Fischer both
American and World Champions and both off the deep end, if a latent paranoid
quality didn't serve them quite well during their glory years, only to blossom
into psychopathology later in life.

You might also speculate that at pathological levels of suspiciousness come to
the surface, the quality of play would begin to degrade, since the person begins
to see "ghosts," threats that don't really exist.

Anyone care to pick up this discussion, or know of other interesting examples?

Roger




Personality and leisure activities: An illustration with chess players.
ABSTRACT 	Investigated the relationship between personality and involvement in
the leisure activity of chess playing. 60 male participants comprised groups of
(1) highly competitive chess players, (2) moderately competitive chess players,
and (3) nonplayers. Results show that of 6 personality characteristics, all
chess players differed from the comparison group in terms of unconventional
thinking and orderliness. Highly competitive players differed from nonplayers in
being significantly more suspicious. The 3 groups did not differ significantly
on neuroticism, aggressive tendency, and hostility. ((c) 1999 APA/PsycINFO, all
rights reserved)
AUTHOR 	Avni, Amatzia; Kipper, David A.; Fox, Shaul
AFFILIATION 	Bar-Ilan U, Ramat Gan, Israel
SOURCE 	Personality & Individual Differences. 1987 Vol 8(5) 715-719

Das Problem Paul Morphy. /The problem of Paul Morphy.
ABSTRACT 	The case of Paul Morphy, the world's greatest chess player, is cited,
and an attempt made to ascertain what relationship may have existed between his
extraordinary ability, manifested in early childhood, and his early death as a
paranoiac. After giving the history of the game, the author describes the method
of the master, then the personality traits which later broke in the paranoiac
state from which early death released him. The author believes that unusual
accomplishment arises as a compensation for inferiority feelings, a type of
sublimation. When this sublimation breaks down, the mental balance is lost. ((c)
1999 APA/PsycINFO, all rights reserved)
AUTHOR 	Jones, E.
AFFILIATION
SOURCE 	Psychoanalytische Bewegung. 1931 3 193-216



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