Chess Therapy

Chess therapy is a form of psychotherapy that uses chess games between a therapist and a client, or clients, to build a stronger connection between them toward the goal of confirming or revising a diagnosis and, in turn, better healing. Its use of board-game tactics and strategies as real-life metaphors is often traced to the Persian polymath Rhazes (854-925), once chief physician of the Baghdad hospital, and was later revived by Fadul and Canlas. One of the earliest reported cases involved an isolated, schizoid sixteen-year-old whose interest in chess gave him a non-retaliatory outlet for hostile impulses, and whose digressions from the game, and his newly acquired ability to talk about his feelings, fantasies and dreams during play, were used therapeutically; the report held that because chess is a game rather than reality, it let the patient exert some conscious control over his feelings and so learn to master them to a degree. Roumen Bezergianov has described using chess as a logotherapy method to help clients discover and fulfill the meaning of their own lives and situations, describing the method in his book Character Education with Chess. In Italy, the Association for the Deaf (ASIS) conducted an early study of chess therapy with deaf children in compulsory schooling, funded in 1992 by the National Research Council, work later summarized in the book Scaccoterapia.