What was Bobby Fischer's mental illness? originally appeared on Quora, the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world. You can follow Quora on Twitter, Facebook, and Google Plus.

After I wrote Searching for Bobby Fischer and until Fischer’s death in 2008 I was often interviewed about Bobby. The question of his mental illness often came up, but often indirectly. From time to time, after his disappearance into a hermetic life in California, Fischer had given bizarre anti-Semitic interviews in which he hurled vulgarities against America, defended the attack on the World Trade Center, cursed the Jews, and cursed me for writing about him. In interviews I was often asked whether Bobby should be considered a great artist given the vile political positions he espoused. To me it was like comparing apples and oranges. Fischer was a great artist on the board in the same way that T.S. Elliot and Ezra Pound were surely great poets despite their anti-Semitism. But more to the point, it had become apparent to almost everyone that that Bobby Fischer was mentally ill.

To the best of my knowledge, Fischer was never diagnosed by a psychiatrist, but when I was doing research for my book I did a lengthy interview with a renowned clinical psychologist, Lou Cassotta. Although he’d never met Bobby, Cassotta was a Fischer fan since the early seventies, had followed his astonishing career and was willing to offer his analysis. On reading Dr. Cassata’s remarks again, after many years, I find them particularly appealing because he does not attempt to define Bobby’s illness with a simplistic diagnostic one liner. Here is what he told me:

“For most of his life, Fischer has worked in opposition the the rest of the world. If you ask him to behave in a socially acceptable manner, he instinctively says no. He has to: he must resist any attempt to be socialized. That’s how he knows himself, by defining himself in opposition to others. That’s why he doesn’t commit himself to a woman, why he rejects the people who are closest to him. He is afraid of intimacy. His friends know how fragile he is, and so they pander to him. Anybody who says anything to him that doesn’t suit him, he writes off. In this way he has created a world that reflects back to him whatever he wants. If he consciously wanted to make himself as unlike everybody in the world as possible, he probably couldn’t have done a better job. But he does it instinctively. He knows himself to be a person who takes the path that no one else will take. He has done this his whole life. Even in quitting at the pinnacle he was doing it. A normal person in his shoes would take advantage of his position by defending his title, writing books, making all the money he could. Instead, Fischer chose the life of an impoverished recluse. There is something admirable about his way; it captures the imagination.

“My guess is that it all started with a control issue early in his life. Perhaps a battle with his mother. Possibly he had to act in opposition to her power, intelligence and appetite for the arts, her Judaism, in order to hold on to his own identity and not be subsumed by her. Then he discovers chess, which is respected neither in society nor in his home. But he is so fantastic a player that he makes it respectable, even fashionable. It’s an unbelievable achievement, but in looking at the history of his life, it seems almost inevitable that he’d chose something that wasn’t accepted and go out and try to make it work. That alone was a large part of his triumph.

“So when he’s finally on top, and the game is recognized, why does he leave it? Maybe for the same reason. Now everybody thinks it’s fine to be a chess player, and he can’t stand that. His game is now mainstream and it make him uncomfortable. So he involves himself in Nazism, which every decent, normal American thinks is horrible, and he’s going to try to make it respectable. He must believe he’ll triumph again, just as he did before. He must be convinced that he has become involved in something that is more important than chess, that he will be the one who finally exposes the Jews.

“Of course the difference is that as a chess player Bobby was a genius and as a political thinker he’s a schmuck. But anti-Semitism is perfect for him because it is built on opposition. Nazis are the bad boys of the world and Fischer identifies with that; he was a bad boy who never did what he was told.”

You can find a copy of Deep Water Blues or Fred’s other novels at his website or Amazon.

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