Repetition and Playing Chess

"The tie of affection, which binds the child as a rule to the parent of the opposite sex, succumbs to disappointment, to a vain expectation of satisfaction, or to an envy over the birth of a new baby - unmistakable proof of the infidelity of the object of the child's affections. His own attempt to make a baby himself, carried out with tragic seriousness, fails shamefully. The lessening amount of affection he receives, the increasing demands of education, hard words, and an occasional punishment - these show him at last the full extent to which he has been scorned."

- Gabi Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle

In other words, we play chess to repeat a trauma. 

One of the most repressed quotes in modern epistemology:

"Can it be that all in a moment you and I have today laid hands upon something which many a wise man has searched for in the past - and gone grey before he found it"

- Socrates (Plato), Theaetetus

Epistemologists are searching for a definition of knowledge but that's impossible, and you can see it wiht any concept. But it's obvious that it's not possible because people have tried - and don't think you're better than they are (incidentally a Socratic teaching)

Socrartes however as depicted by Plato (which is highly accurate anyways) is a neurotic (as G. Freud terms it). Here we can see the repeition compulsion at work - at the end of the dialogue:

"This art of midwifery my mother and I had alloted to us, she to deliver women, I to deliver men"

In context, generally Socrates called coming up with new ideas "giving birth" to them - so here he wants to act as a teacher and help young men, all "that have any beauty" give birth to new ideas - they will fail to define a concept and so become "gentler" and "less tiresome" "modest", etc (incidentally Kant's term for this sublime limit of reason is humble or humility). 

But the point is you can see it's all a meta(psycho)analysis aimed at a necessary overcoming of trauma (not trauma as in war trauma but any time you felt powerless, that's why you play and make fantasies to repeat for infantile wish-fulfillemtns so to speak)

So playing the fantastic game of chess is a way to repeat trauma and to get power

Thoughts?

that's what deluded people believe...to admit that's wrong takes guts, like a groping in the dark

It's like how a dream works - everything does represent some felt anxiety during the day and by dream analysis (even colloquial ones like "oh, this meant that!") you can discover what each thing represents. 

Waking life is no different except for the fact that you question usual social constructs