Chess for and in Therapy

I'm an educational psychologist, but am doing psychotherapy on a part-time basis. I have used chess in and for therapy of some students. I am also a teacher.

I play with a chess-playing client, first to build rapport, and secondly to get to know his or her personality through the way he or she plays chess. I get to know his or her risk-taking behavior, impulsiveness, planning skills, behavior under presure, etc. I find the analysis of a client's games very helpful.

Are there others here at chess.com who also use chess for and in psycho-therapy? I'll be glad to interact and share ideas.

Book Preview:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TGkcKlNlUmg

That was a strange "preview". From what I gathered, you're selling a book, and here's what a book looks like. I guess the surest way of getting patients for therapy is to get them to play chess- very clever.

Huh!? Mr. Rick Kennedy, writer and reviewer for Chessville (www.chessville.com) and Chessville Weekly, and a practicing child therapist for over 30 years (MSW, LISW) is currently reading this book Chess Therapy, 2nd Ed, and a review will soon be released.

Indeed, chess is for mainly entertainment and copetitive play. But the game can also be used as a tool for psychotherapy. ;-)

According to some psychotherapists, an interest in chess indicates deep mental disturbances.

Freud was a psychotherapist. I guess it takes one to know one....

I suppose it should be a little troubling that you are dabbling outside of your area of training, educational psychology. Therapy is probably pretty serious stuff. Fortuntely, it's not on my list of stuff to care about. I checked, as they say.

I also find it interesting you describe yourself as an "educational psychologist" not that you work as an educational psychologist.

Anyway, good luck with it.

Some (very few) indeed. But mainstream psychotherapies and research show that it's a normal distribution: mental disturbances are found in all walks of life, and an interest in chess is also found in all types of people--some mentally disturbed, some practicing psychotherapy, but most in normal people like most of us.

Yes, therapy is serious. That is why, through the years, I had training in counseling and even in short-term psychotherapy courses. I took several units of psychotherapy as cognate subjects when I was doing my PhD more than a decade ago and met Christian mentors who do psychotherapy. I initially worked with them as a volunteer counselor in Christian camps, and continued doing so from time to time even after graduation. Much later, a former mentor referred cases of motiational problems to me (they come from Christian families--the parents insist that the counselor or therapist should be a Christian). Through the years, I was able to help several teens suffering from the storms and stress of adolescence, getting low grades or unnecessarily dropping out of school. When I got my tenure as professor, I had to limit accepting clients to holidays or term breaks. The satisfaction I had in being able to help change a person for the better is beyond words. In many of these cases, I played chess with my client (or the parent of my client) simply to gain rapport or emotional affinity with him or her.

Thank you for wishing me "luck" though often times, as in a chess game, I may believe in it but I don't rely on it.

It's just a question on semantics. (English is not my first language.) I am currently a full professor (tenured) at De La Salle-College of Saint Benilde in Manila. I've been full-time teaching in this school for the past twelve years. In this school, professors may do research on learning and teaching materials development and get "deloaded" from regular teaching. I've availed mysself of this research privilege twice. My PhD (University of the Philippines, '99) is in Educational Psychology.

In http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TGkcKlNlUmg my co-author and I saw chess games to 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.

Chess games are wish fulfillments, and that an important part of these wishes 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 conrolling minds.

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 chesss 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 yourself. 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.