Notas sobre la actividad lúdica del adulto:

El ajedrez

Abstract

The problem is presented of knowing what happens in the adult who plays games, and why he plays them. The problem here takes another direction: what happens in an adult who cannot do without his game. This is the situation of an autist patient whose almost exclusive activity consisted in playing chess. The entire attitude of the patient, his gestures, his movements, his incoherent phrases, constituted his chess-player’s manner of behaviour towards his psycho-analyst. It proved possible to interpret the situation in this way, and give access to the autist core of his personality, — a “fairy” or idealized mother whom he was bound to defend and preserve, and who could raise him to immortality if he succeeded in saving her from the attacks of her persecutors, internal and external. The game of chess represented the internal drama of the patient. There, in the limits of the chess-board, he could order and recorder its objects, prove his capacity for defence, avoid the “whirlpool”, the internal chaos, the mingling of god and bad imagos. These situations were transposed in the transfer by means of phrases and words used as chessmen in analysis-session games of chess. The interpretation technique employed was that described by Melanie Klein in connection with children’s games.
The change in the patient’s internal situation appeared at the moment he “changed games” and proposed that we play at dice, which signified a less controlled attitude, the acceptance of chance, of time, of death. He was able to speak in a more coherent manner and enrich little by little his relationships with the world by breaking through the rigid limits of his “vital chessboard”.
The conclusion was:
1. That the “game” situation in the adult expresses and satisfies situations of primitive anxiety (paranoid and depressive);
2. That in the adult it also constitutes a bridge between phantasy and reality; that it is a means of action, but that when it loses its “as if” quality it is converted into the action itselfs;
3. It share a the same internal characteristics, the same functions and the same intentionality as children’s games, as described by Freud and Klein;
4. The case cited was interpreted according to the principles of Melanie Klein, and at the moment when the “fairy”, the idealized object, lost her power, he was able to give me words and come out of the chess-situation, admit death, and experience, while analyzing them by maens of the mecanism of protective identification, his paranoid and depressive anxieties which found expression in the game of chess.