Author: Will Singleton
Date: 19:17:39 01/19/00
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On January 19, 2000 at 18:36:46, Roger wrote: >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 > > <snip> I'd be wary of generalizations based on such a small sample. But it's an interesting question, nonetheless. We wish for perfection, rather than accept greatness along with the flaws. Perhaps that's best, I don't know. It was very hard for me to see Fischer's decline, since those were my formative chess years (I really used to play better, really!). I invested a lot in him, and much like a sports team gone bad, the decline is (was) hard to take. I'd say that the propensity for achievement is not the root cause of the neurosis/psychosis, but rather, the reaction or behavior of family and society to greatness tends to push those susceptible folks over the edge. After all, we all must be dullards (by comparison) not to go bonkers in this world, when you think about it. Will
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