Chess therapy

Chess therapy is a form of psychotherapy that attempts to use chess games between the therapist and client or clients to form stronger connections between them towards a goal of confirmatory or alternate diagnosis and consequently, better healing. Its founder can be considered to be the Persian polymath Rhazes (AD 852-932), who was at one time the chief physician of the Baghdad hospital. His use of tactics and strategies in board games as metaphors in real life to help his patients think clearer were rediscovered and employed by Fadul and Canlas.

One of the earliest reported cases of chess therapy involves the improvement in an isolated, schizoid, 16-year-old youth that took place after he became interested in chess. Chess provided an outlet for his hostile impulses in a non-retaliatory manner. Good use was made of the patient's digressions from the game and his newly acquired ability to speak about his feelings, fantasies and dreams which the particular emotional situation of the game touched off. The report demonstrates how the fact that chess is a game, and not real, enabled the patient to exert some conscious control over his feelings and thus learn to master them to a limited extent.

In a relatively recent review by an Indian psycho-therapist, Thomas Janetius chess therapy is considered to be a form of creative therapy. Chess games may contain most of what we need to know about the causes of our psychological troubles; they can tell us why we are as we are - victim or martyr, sexually impotent, deprived child looking for adventure, etc.,--but they can also show us the remedy for our disorder. The unconscious, through chess games, is not concerned merely with putting right the things that have gone wrong in us. Chess games aim at our well-being in the fullest sense; their goal is nothing less than our complete personal victory or development in defeats, the creative unfolding of the potentialities that are contained in the analysis of the games that we played, whether we won, lost or drew.

In psychoanalysis chess games are wish fulfillment, and that an important part of these wish fulfillment are the result of repressed desires - desires that can scare us so much that our games may turn into a series of defeats. Chess games can be divided into wishful games, anxiety games, and punitive games. Punitive games are in fact also fulfillment of wishes, though not of wishes of the instinctual impulses but of those of the critical, censoring, and punishing agency in our controlling minds. Thus, for Jungian Psychology chess imagery is part of a universal symbolic language. Roumen Bezergianov uses chess as a Logotherapy method, to help his clients discover and fulfill the meanings of their unique lives and life situations. He describes his method in the book "Character Education with Chess" ().

Chess games are an open pathway toward our true thoughts, emotions, and actions. In your chess games you are able to somehow see your aggressive impulses and desires. Chess games are a way of compensating for your shortcomings in your life. For instance, if a person is unable to stand up to his boss, he may safely lash out an attack at a chess piece in a chess game. Thus chess games offer some sort of satisfaction that may be more socially acceptable.

In Gestalt therapy, we seek to fill our emotional voids so that we can become a unified whole. Some chess games contain the rejected, disowned parts of the self. Every chess piece, tactic, and/or strategy in a chess game represents an aspect of oneself as shown in a case involving a boy with Landau-Kleffner syndrome. In a sense, chess imagery is not part of a universal symbolic language because each chess game is unique to the individual who played it.