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Since Jones' essay, the psychoanalysis of chess has been increasingly preoccupied with sexual symbolism. Said Menninger about chess players: "Silently they are plotting (and attempting to execute) murderous campaigns of patricide, matricide, fratricide, regicide and mayhem." A great chess player, Manhattan's Reuben Fine, has popularized a psychology of chess studded with phallic symbols, spattered with anal-sadistic impulses and imbued with latent homosexuality. In successive rounds, Fine once defeated Botvinnik, Reshevsky, Euwe, Flohr and Alekhine, and drew with Capablanca. When Fine switched his major interest from chess to psychoanalysis, the result was a loss for chess—and a draw, at best, for psychoanalysis. Many psychologists, some Freudians included, now believe that the sexual symbolism in chess is vastly overdrawn.
Jones emphasized that the king is the father image and that its most savage attacker is the queen of the opposite color. This, say the analysts, is a paradigm of the family in which mother is pitted against father. They ignore the fact that the king's most powerful defender is his own queen. For the mother-father conflict to have validity, the player must have crossed loyalties, which might well make him schizophrenic.
Such symbolism aside, the motives and methods of chess players are as varied as their personalities. Even among the small number of men who have been world champions in this century there have been polar differences. Emanuel Lasker, title holder from 1894 to 1921, was a philosopher, mathematician and thoroughgoing "square" by most psychological standards. His satisfactions from chess appear to have been entirely intellectual. Cuba's Jose Capablanca (champion from 1921 to 1927), who gave up the orderliness of a projected career in engineering to become a chess giant and his country's hero, enjoyed competition in other lines than chess, notably tennis, bridge and the pursuit of women. Alexander Alekhine (1927-35, 1937-46) is best described in Fine's words as "the sadist of the chess world." He went through five marriages, was involved in a campaign of antiSemitism, dipsomania, and enough other psychopathology to fill a casebook. The Netherlands' Max Euwe (1935-37), as square as Lasker was, is a conventional paterfamilias and also a mathematics professor with a cool passion for order on the board.
Since 1948, all of the world champions have been Russians—from Mikhail Botvinnik (three times) to Boris Spassky. Their personalities, temperaments and styles of play reflect not only East-West cultural differences, but also the peculiar status of chess in Communist countries. While chess is merely a game for the Russian masses, it is a profession or at least a second profession for the Soviet chess masters, who may also be engineers or physicists. Both teaching and play are state-supported, and grand masters get good pay and high honors. So when a grand master competes outside Russia, he is, to a considerable degree, representing his country. In fact, some chess experts claim to see, in many of Spassky's games, as in Botvinnik's, a gray sameness that reflects much of Communist Russia's culture and character.