Lately, chess seems to have been rehabilitated, at least in the public perception.  Once considered to be the refuge of the odd, the overly passionate or the likely mad, it is now seen as good for young students (“chess makes you smart!”), protective of adolescents (“push pawns, not drugs!”), and possibly even of benefit to aging adults (keeping the mind sharp and possibly putting off the onset of Alzheimer’s disease).

So it should not be too surprising to encounter the title Chess Therapy by Fadul (PhD) and Canlas (PhD candidate) of the De La Salle-College of Saint Benilde, Manila, the Philippines.

True, the royal game has always had its “chess is good for you” cheerleaders.  Recall Benjamin Franklin’s 1786 The Morals of Chess wherein he opined:

The game of Chess is not merely an idle amusement; several very valuable qualities of the mind, useful in the course of human life, are to be acquired and strengthened by it, so as to become habits ready on all occasions...

More than 150 years before Franklin, the scholar Albert Burton (prone to depression himself) had already written in his The Anatomy of Melancholy, What it is: With all the Kinds, Causes, Symptomes, Prognostickes, and Several Cures of it.  In Three Maine Partitions with their several Sections, Members, and Subsections.  Philosophically, Medicinally, Historically, Opened and Cut Up:

Chesse-play is a good and wittie exercise for the mind of some kind of men, and fit for such melancholy persons as are idle and have impertinent thoughts, or troubled with cares, nothing better to distract their minde and alter their meditations.

In fact, the authors of Chess Therapy inform us that the 9^th century Persian physician Rhazes (Abu Bakr Mohammad Ibn Zakariya al-Razi), played shatranj (a precursor to chess), “and counseled his patients and students according to metaphors and applications of chess game configurations in real life situations.”

However, the majority of intersections between psychology and chess (see a sample at My Chess Psychology Book Shelf) has not included chess-in-therapy or chess-as-therapy, but, rather, examinations of the unconscious motivations of chess players:

(as illustrated by Ernest Jones’ 1931 “The Problem of Paul Morphy – A Contribution to the Psycho-Analysis of Chess”; Norman Reider’s 1959 “Chess, Oedipus and the Mater Dolorosa”; and Reuben Fine’s 1967 The Psychology of the Chess Player and 1973 Bobby Fischer's Conquest of the World's Chess Championship: The Psychology and Tactics of the Title Match) or

...their thinking processes in arriving at a plan or move:

(from Alfred Binet’s 1894 “Psychologie des Grand Calculateurs et des Jouers d’Echecs” through Adriaan de Groot’s 1946 “Het denken van den schaker”,  to Alexander Kotov’s 1971 Think Like A Grandmaster, to Dennis Holding’s 1985 The Psychology of Chess Skill, and a return to the neo-de Grootians such as Jan Przewoznik and Mark Soszynski’s 2001 How to Think in Chess, Amatzia Avni’s 2004 The Grandmaster's Mind, and even Dan Heisman’s 2009 The Improving Chess Thinker).

So, we can approach Chess Therapy, 2^nd Ed, (“Additional pictures, figures and illustrations make this second edition more interesting”) with an increasing sense of expectation.

After all, as Jill Bellinson wrote in her 2002 book, Children's Use of Board Games in Psychotherapy,

As flooded as the literature is with articles describing the uses of dramatic play, there is a drought of information about board games; there must be fewer than a dozen article, most of them derogatory.

For the record, here are a few relevant sources, arranged chronologically:

• Pfister, O. (1931). "Ein Hamlet am Schachbrett." Psa. Beweg., 3, 3. Ravirty, H. A. (1902). J. Asiatic Soc. of Bengal, 71, 47.

• Meninger, K., (1942). Chess. Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic 6:80-83,

• Fleming, J., and Strong, S.M. (1943). Observations on the use of chess in the therapy of an adolescent boy. Psychoanalytic Review, 30:399-416

• Reider, N. (1945). Observations on the use of chess in the therapy of an adolescent boy. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 14:562

• Pakenham-Walsh, R. (1949). Chess as a form of recreational therapy. Journal of Mental Science, 95:203-204

• Slap, J.W. (1957). Some clinical and theoretical remarks on chess. Journal of Hillside Hospital 6:150-155.

• Fried, S. (1992). Chess: A psychoanalytic tool in the treatment of children. International Journal of Play Therapy, 1(1), 43-50.

• Gaines, L., Berkovitz, I., & Kohn, B. (2000). Chess as a way of improving object relationships in narcissistic teenagers. In A. H. Esman, L. T. Flaherty, & H. Horowitz (Eds.), Adolescent psychiatry: Developmental and clinical studies (pp. 187-199). Mahwah, NJ: Analytic Press.

• Smith, William.H. (2002). Chess. In C.E. Schaefer & D. M. Cangelosi (Eds), Play therapy techniques (pp. 347-354). Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson

Ah, if only Sigmund Freud had played chess!

Actually, he did, as his biographer Ernest Jones noted:

Freud played a good deal of chess in coffee houses in the earlier years, but he came to find the concentration more of a strain than an enjoyment, and after 1901 he gave it up altogether.

As for the utility of chess in therapy (and a caveat), here are two perspectives from the field, the first from Charles E. Schaefer and Kevin J. O'Connor’s Handbook of Play Therapy Volume Two: Advances and Innovations and the second from Stella Chess (!) and Alexander Thomas’ Temperment in Clinical Practice:

Much can be learned from analyzing the play of adults in chess, for example. The play therapist can learn how the client engages in problem solving, how he or she reacts to success or failure, and how the client engages in conflict management – there are adult clients who will argue extensively about the rules of chess; who try to manipulate the play therapist through chess play; who succumb to defeat long before the play is over and during the time they could still win; who blatantly or covertly cheat; who are relentless at reminding everyone around them that they won the game; who make a particular non-legal chess move appear to be an accident when it was actually intended to assist the client in winning. Those are just a few examples of the many ways people reveal themselves during chess play…

…[I]f the youngster is interested in checkers or chess, and the therapist has some competence with these games, a game of checkers or chess may illuminate issues of competitiveness, specific temperamental attributes such as intensity, persistence, or distractibility, self-defeating responses to failure, patterns of communication, or some cognitive disturbance in approaching a challenging task. However, the therapist must be wary of incorporating such a game into the routines of therapy itself. A game that permits or even requires periods of silent contemplation while the youngster figures out stratagems of play, may easily become the central occupation of the therapeutic session. If this becomes part of the regular schedule of treatment, then the game loses its therapeutic value, and rather sidetracks the opportunities for active and direct discussions of the child’s real-life problems.

So, on to Chess Therapy.

After a “Table of Contents” and a short “Foreword” by FIDE Master Fernie Donguines (coach of the De La Salle-College of Saint Benilde chess team), “Part 1” consists of twenty-six pages (three of which are blank) that primarily provide an introduction (clearly for a lay audience) to psychotherapy and the various related systems or schools of thought and practice (psychoanalytic, cognitive behavioral, existential, etc.).

Often a description will be accompanied by a chess-related sentence or two.  For example:

Existential – is based on the existential belief that human beings are alone in the world. This aloneness leads to feelings of meaninglessness, which can be overcome only by creating one’s own values and meanings.  The therapist may have several post-game analyses with the client and discuss the pins, forks, sacrifices, tactics and strategies, etc., as metaphors of certain situations in real life.

“Part 1” has some tantalizing chess references, including “two cases wherein the therapist employed hypnosis in the middle of a chess game with the client” and “team chess games have been explored for group therapy,” but for the most part it reads like a psychology primer with occasional chess content tucked in.

For example, the sub-section “Criticisms and Questions regarding Effectiveness of Games in Therapy” is three-and-a-half pages long and is mostly about the efficacy of therapy, containing only one sentence referring to “games and social contact” and simply one paragraph on chess in therapy.

As Dickens’ character Oliver Twist once intoned, “Please, sir, I want some more.”

Luckily for the inquisitive reader, “Part 2 Application of Chess into Therapy Eight Case Studies” contains 45 pages in which the authors present eight clients with whom chess was used in a therapeutic manner, followed by an enlightening Discussion.

By the way, confidentiality, crucial to any counseling relationship, was maintained throughout the book’s discussions.  This led to some inadvertent humor, however, as four pictures of an ongoing chess game between one of the authors and a client have clearly been cropped to show mostly arms, hands, chess pieces and the board.

Of particular interest in the case studies is the use of an online chess site – in this case, Chess.com – as a way for the client and therapist to interact, play a game, and make use of the available computer analysis of the moves.  I guess it’s time to add “online chess therapy” to the current, on-going discussions of the virtues and pitfalls of “internet therapy.”

There follow four pages of “References”, an “Index” and an appendix of “Illustrative Screen Shots of Online Articles on Chess Therapy with Web Logs (Blogs) by the Authors.”

The book itself, a product of the print-on-demand publisher Lulu, has an attractive cover and is generally well laid out (although I have trouble at times with the white spaces and blank pages – perhaps this is an artifact of the size or number of signatures used in the book’s production).

Computer screen shots have been reproduced clearly, if at times with tiny print; photographs have fared less well, and have a certain fuzziness.  Occasional grammar errors occur, which may indicate that English is not the authors’ first language – but these should have been tidied up for this, the second edition.

More troublesome are a few instances of repetition of content, or too-close-paraphrasing, which in places give the text a cobbled-together feel.

For example, “Most forms of therapy use spoken conversation.  Some also use various other forms of communication such as the written word…” starts off the last paragraph on page 1, and reappears in the middle of the last paragraph on page 11 as “Most forms of psychotherapy use only spoken conversation, though some also use other forms of communication such as the written word…”

The same chess anecdote about one of the authors playing a chess game with a client shows up in two different Case Studies.  The specifics of the games are almost identical, only the author’s opponent is different.

Puzzling is the phrase “Purposeful, theoretically based psychotherapy…” which occurs in the first paragraph of page 2, and again in the first paragraph of page 7.  In the former case, it is continued “…began in the 19^th century with psychoanalysis…” whereas in the latter case it is continued “…was probably first developed in the Middle East during the 9^th century…”

Again, all of this is out of place for a second, 'improved' edition.

In many ways Chess Therapy is a maddening read.  Too often it teases the reader with something fascinating, and then runs away, leaving mostly the same old same old.  From such path-breakers, I expect a super highway, not a foot trail.  As just one suggestion, I’d love to see “Part 2” of the book expanded ten-fold, with more in-depth notes on the clinical interactions, focusing upon revealing the underlying theories that the authors use to guide their work.

It is clear to me that something very interesting is going on in Dr. Fadul’s practice.  It is clear that the authors have a fascinating story to tell, one that should interest chess players and clinicians alike.  Trust me – I’ve been a clinician for over 30 years, and a chess player for over 50 years, and I’m ready to join Oliver:  “Please, sir, I want some more.”

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