Pawn Sacrifice - Does ingenuity have a dark side?

Note: The conclusions in the text are based on the film. The information related to the life of Bobby Fischer is much more extensive than the information from the movie about him.

"Pawn Sacrifice" is a film about chess grandmaster Bobby Fischer. Based on true events and showing Fischer through different points in time, the film puts focus on the 1972 world chess championship in Reykjavik - Bobby Fischer vs. Boris Spassky.

Bobby Fischer has been practicing chess since he was six years old. In 1958, at the age of 15, he became the youngest chess champion in the USA. Fisher was a citizen of the USA, he spent his childhood in the family with his mother and sister. Even during his childhood, under the influence of information from his environment, he takes a negative attitude towards communist ideology. Although his mother, Regina Fischer, officially held anti-communist views, she was suspected of supporting the communist system, due to her emotional connection with a man who supported communist ideology. The negative attitude formed during childhood towards the "communists" later became the basis of Fischer's identity and self-image.

The USSR was a chess superpower for about two decades, with world chess champions from that country. In 1972, at the World Championship in Reykjavík, the duel was not between the players of the USSR, but against Boris Spassky was a chess player from the USA.

Fischer was a specific personality - an introvert who spent most of his time practicing and playing chess, had a lack of adequate social relationships in which he would develop capacities for psychological closeness, reduced contact and dysfunctional relationships with his mother and sister.

At the moment of going to the world championship, such a person experiences the intensification of negative attitudes about the world formed earlier. His identity is no longer just chess player, but US chess player, and also a "fighter for justice". For him, going to the world championship is not only a competition against another chess player, but also a competition against Russia's dominant position in chess, against communist ideology. To that extent, competition for him does not exist only on the real level of competition in knowledge, it becomes a struggle between two already opposed systems.

Photo taken from the site: www.imdb.com

He identifies with the role of a lone fighter against an organized system and has the identity of being withdrawn and alienated from others. What Fischer needs is recognition, but recognition of triumphant strength, confirmation of his uniqueness, giftedness and skill.

From childhood, throughout his life, until old age, he has one characteristic - in the vocabulary of transactional analysis, the so-called paranoid existential position. It arises when the child could not trust an important person and then comes to the conclusion that others cannot be trusted. When he grows up and when such an attitude is generalized to different life situations, he can develop an attitude where the individual feels good if he perceives himself as more valuable, more important than others. With such a belief, he happens to be rude in his communication with others. This can result in others distancing themselves from such a person. Then the individual does not question the reasons why people react in such a way, but as a kind of "automatic response" and experience has the conclusion: "It is because I have always been better than them". It is called a paranoid position because others are evaluated as threatening, and there is constant suspicion of others, their intentions, actions, intentions. Because of his basic belief "I'm ok, others are not ok", it's hard to believe that sometimes others really have good wishes and intentions. In this way, a person limits himself from corrective experiences and remains trapped in decisions from the past.

Scenes in the film show the struggle that Fischer leads with a paranoid attitude towards the world and others: disconnecting the phone, interrupting the televised match, demanding that the chairs on which Fischer and Spassky are sitting, interpreting the president's appeal to continue the match as a fight in which the USA should win.

One of the impressions of the screened story about Fischer is the question of what is the relationship between above-average intellectual abilities and achievements with the psychological state that Fischer had - paranoid attitude and interpretations? Such a system of psychopathological characteristics, in accordance with the categorization of the World Health Organization ICD-10, can be marked as a paranoid psychosis, where insane ideas of persecution are present. It is important to note that the creation of this type of disorder, in addition to psychological factors, can also be influenced by biological and social factors.

Psychological factors include the way an individual communicates with important people. If important persons are such that you cannot trust them, that they say one thing and behave in another way - precisely that gap between what is said and what they do is a space in which the conclusion can be drawn that not only can these persons not be trusted, that one cannot have security and trust in them, but such an attitude can be generalized to other people as well. Another psychological mechanism is that important figures transmit their paranoid attitude to the child. This means that important figures are not aware of their distorted image of others and the world, they experience these contents as accurate and raise their children with these beliefs. What we can see in the film are both of these elements. Example of a scene from the movie: Fischer's mother tells her son anti-communist statements, and later Fischer sees that she is in a relationship with a person who believes in the communist system.

The author Rotenberg in the book "Creativity and Madness" states that certain areas of science can be attractive to creators, precisely because of the characteristics of those areas - areas in which the material is abstract and organized into systems of information and knowledge. This does not mean that these contents cause a mental disorder, but that due to a lack of social skills, problems in emotional regulation, a lack of psychologically close social relations, time and abilities are largely devoted exclusively to the study of abstract material, the execution of which does not require emotional capacities, but only intellectual ones. This does not mean that the person does not have emotions, but that he suppresses them and is not in contact with them . (Rotenberg, 2010)

If we want to make the shortest description of Bobby Fischer's inner world and attitude towards the environment, we can refer to Boris Spassky's statement:

"When I played with Bobby Fischer, my opponent was playing against the organization - the television production and the organizers of the competition. But he never fought me personally. I lost to Bobby even before the match, because he was already stronger than me. He won effortlessly.''

Photo taken from the site: www.imdb.com

In addition to the movie "Pawn Sacrifice", there are numerous shows, documentaries, books about Fischer's life and his chess game. We laymen can only watch his brilliant games and try to copy some of his tactics when we play chess with a friend in a cafe where there is a chess set.

Literature: Rothenberg. A. (2010). Creativity and madness: new discoveries and old stereotypes. Clio, Belgrade.

Author: Bojana Škorić