A Psychological Autopsy of Bobby Fischer

December 14, 2010

A Psychological Autopsy of Bobby Fischer

It’s uncertain whether counseling and treatment could have helped American chess champion Bobby Fischer with his chess or his paranoia. But his tortured life illustrates why our most promising young talents deserve better support programs early on.

By Joseph G. Ponterotto

At a 1958 tournament in Yugoslavia, Mikhail Tal, a legendary attacking grandmaster and one-time world champion, mocked chess prodigy Bobby Fischer for being “cuckoo.” Tal’s taunting may have been a deliberate attempt to rattle Fischer, then just 15 but already a major force in the highly competitive world of high-level chess.

But others from that world — including a number of grandmasters who’d spent time with him — thought Fischer not just eccentric, but deeply troubled. At a tournament in Bulgaria four years later, U.S. grandmaster Robert Byrne suggested that Fischer see a psychiatrist, to which Fischer replied that “a psychiatrist ought to pay [me] for the privilege of working on [my] brain.” According to journalist, Hungarian-born grandmaster Pal Benko commented, “I am not a psychiatrist, but it was obvious he was not normal. … I told him, ‘You are paranoid,’ and he said that ‘paranoids can be right.’”

Robert James Fischer passed away of kidney failure at the age of 64 in January 2008 in his adopted home of Reykjavik, Iceland, where, 36 years earlier, he had captivated the world with his stunning defeat of Boris Spassky, the reigning world chess champion from Russia. As the first North American to win the world title after a half-century of Russian domination, Fischer gained enduring worldwide fame.

By most all accounts a brilliant mind, Fischer was perhaps the most visionary chess player since José Raul Capablanca, a Cuban who held the world title for six years in the 1920s. Fischer’s innovative, daring play — at age 13, he defeated senior master (and former U.S. Open champion) Donald Byrne in what is sometimes called “The Game of the Century” — made him a hero figure to millions in the United States and throughout the world. In 1957, Fischer became the youngest winner of the U.S. chess championship — he was just 14 — before going on to beat Spassky for the world title in 1972.

But Fischer forfeited that title just three years later, refusing to defend his crown under rules proposed by the World Chess Federation, and he played virtually no competitive chess in ensuing decades, retreating, instead, into isolation and seeming paranoia. Because of a series of rankly anti-Semitic public utterances and his praise, on radio, for the Sept. 11, 2001 attack on the World Trade Center, at his death, Fischer was seen by much of the world as spoiled, arrogant and mean-spirited.

In recent years, however, researchers have come to understand that Bobby Fischer was psychologically troubled from early childhood. Careful examination of his life and family shows that he likely suffered with mental illness that may never have been properly diagnosed or treated.

Any psychological evaluation of a person who is not alive must, of course, include a great deal of qualification. But the psychological history of America’s greatest chess champion clearly raises two profound questions, one specific to Fischer and chess and the other more general: What would Bobby Fischer’s life and career have looked like had he received appropriate mental health services throughout his life? And is there a way for society to help troubled, often defiant prodigies become less troubled, without diminishing their genius and eventual contribution to society?

To understand Bobby Fischer’s psychological makeup, it is important to understand his personal history, which began on March 9, 1943, when he was born in Chicago to Regina Wender, a Swiss native of Polish-Jewish heritage, and, most likely, Paul Felix Nemenyi, a Hungarian-born and -trained mechanical engineer who met Regina in 1942. He was also Jewish. (Hans Gerhardt Fischer, a German-born biophysicist whom Regina married in Moscow in 1933, is listed as Fischer’s father on his birth certificate, but FBI records released after Regina’s death and other documentation make it all but certain that Nemenyi was the biological father.)

Bobby had an older sister, Joan, born to Regina and Hans Gerhardt Fischer in 1937 in Moscow, where the couple was living at the time. Soon after Joan’s birth, the marriage between Hans Gerhardt and Regina began to fail, and in 1939, Regina and Joan came to the United States without him. He never entered the U.S. and by all accounts was totally absent in the lives of the Fischer children. In 1945, Regina legally divorced him.

Soon after Bobby’s birth, Regina Fischer moved the family from Chicago to Pullman, Wash., where Paul Nemenyi was then living, then to Moscow, Idaho, on to Portland, Ore., then south to Los Angeles, and on to the tiny town of Mobile, in the Arizona desert about 35 miles southwest of Phoenix. According to Frank Brady’s classic biography of Fischer, Profile of a Prodigy, Regina took odd jobs to support her family until eventually gaining employment as a teacher in Los Angeles and Mobile.

From Arizona, the Fischer family moved to Brooklyn, N.Y., in 1949, where Regina, already a registered nurse, pursued a master’s degree in nursing education at New York University. When Bobby was 6, his sister bought him an inexpensive chess set from a candy store, and together they learned the moves. Bobby had always liked games and puzzles, and initially his interest in chess was unremarkable, as he reflected years later to Brady: “At first it was just a game like any other, only a little more complicated.”

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