Movies in mind: Pawn Sacrifice —appreciating the anatomy of oddness

Chess is merely the platform from which to understand the tortuous biography of Bobby Fischer—arguably America’s greatest advertisement for this most revered sport. Toby Maguire (of Spiderman fame) aptly portrays Fischer as an obsessional, entitled and pathologically paranoid man with a genius IQ (of 181) who ultimately sabotages his own success.

As it proceeds through his childhood and career, the film rightly pauses for nodal points in the personality development of this eccentric man: his Jewish German immigrant heritage, his adolescent turmoil and the pivotal role of mentorship—all of which collectively paved Bobby Fischer’s path to that ‘moment of glory’ during the Cold War between America and the Soviet Union: the match between him and Boris Spassky in Reykjavik, Iceland, in 1972.

Bobby Fischer presents as an outsider and misfit—someone who becomes so contemptuous of mankind that writers of old would have described him as ‘misanthropic’. Painfully but poignantly portrayed is the progressive isolation and despair that his thinking causes him. Such ‘gnawing’ paranoia will also severely test his grasp of reality. For example, his heightened concern with the whirring sound of cameras during one of the games with Spassky, or his conspiratorial interpretation of audience coughs that make him demand a change of rooms for his subsequent matches.

Although not dramatized in this film, Fischer’s later years were characterized by even more erratic decisions, explosive outbursts, disavowal of both his American and Jewish Heritage, worsening paranoia, frank anti-Semitism and progressive psychosocial decline to the point of self-neglect and vagrancy.

For psychiatrists, such a symptom profile and course would be befitting of paranoid personality disorder, schizotypal personality disorder or even schizophrenia. Reflecting on this film however, I was struck by how ‘dry’ descriptions of these disorders currently are. For me, they do not convey how it ‘feels’ to be paranoid or anxious, or how they impact others. In addition, there is no exploration of what ‘oddness’ actually entails. Yet, today’s trainees’ knowledge appears to spring almost entirely from such dull Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM)-driven writing—much of which ends up in the textbooks. Is it any wonder that psychiatrists may be ‘glossing over’ such psychopathology? This disconnect has been described before (Andreason, 2007), but I think it deserves serious pause for thought. Perhaps we should now incorporate the validity of subjective experience into our so-called ‘objective’ criteria? Or perhaps we should train our trainees to be ‘attuned to the subjective’ in their history taking?

Films, of course, have artistic license to appeal to our affective understanding in ways that books cannot. I would contend, however, that writing can be equally successful in conveying the experience of paranoia. In comparing texts, I was unexpectedly impressed by the International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems–10th Revision (ICD-10) (World Health Organization [WHO], 1992) with its memorable ‘thumbnail sketch’ of schizophrenia, along with my notable absence of ‘word indigestion’ (too many words crammed onto the page so that it becomes overwhelming to read). Nonetheless, valuable terms such as ‘delusional mood’ (Wahnstimmung) (Jaspers, 1997) or ‘free-floating anxiety’ have practically disappeared from our vernacular. If authentic understanding is what we are truly seeking, perhaps the return of such distinctive and subjective descriptions of psychopathology can help ‘humanize’ our craft once more? Such ‘second order empathy’ skills by psychiatrists have, in fact, recently been elucidated in detail (Fuchs and Stanghellini, 2013).

As for Bobby Fischer, his unique concoction of intelligence and oddness, as well as anxiety and paranoia, was yet another vivid reminder of the impact of mental illness, and all that it leaves in its furious wake.