What Makes a Gambler?

What makes a gambler? In a wonderful book What’s“ Luck Got to Do With It?”, the author, Joseph Mazur, writes on psychology of gambling. “Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century theories of psychopathology did not distinguish between so-called neurotic gamblers and social or entertainment gamblers. Starting with the Freudian school, such psychoanalytical theories were based on the assumption that almost all of human behavior is a result of subconscious mental activity. Added was the collective unconscious with its instinctive memories and inherited diary of neurotic tensions stored in the id, transmitted generation to generation from the time of our earliest ancestor, what the nineteenth-century gambling historian Andrew Steinmetz called hereditary transmission. Opposing the id is the superego, a place in the subconscious holding parental reproaches, moral censorship, and cultural conventions. The ego, answering to man's nature, tries to mediate the conflict, but as these powerful internal conflicts brew, the individual is plagued with feelings of guilt and anxiety, which Freud considered the surfacing of the id over the superego as a tension between the conscience and the actual performances of the ego. It was believed that that tension is experienced as a sense of guilt. Freud’s idea of these internal conflicts came from ancient myths purporting intense Incestuous acts, such as the story of the Theban king who unknowingly killed his father and married his mother; those myths, according to Freud, build in the collective unconsciousness of human phylogeny. Applied to gamblers, these theories say that the gambler’s true motivation may not be his conscious will to win but an unconscious desire caused by some internal conflict, possibly even an unconscious desire to lose. To us, this may seem radical, outrageous, and perhaps the twaddle of an idea made into theory without evidence. Nonetheless, the theory is intriguing, for it connects the gambler's desire to control that which cannot be controlled with the unconscious wish for punishment. In the foreword to his book, The Psychology of Gambling, the distinguished twentieth-century Freudian analyst and clinician Edmund Bergler wrote that the purpose of his book was to prove that the gambler has an unconscious wish to lose, and that that is why the gambler always loses in the long run. Gambling is not played for money but as a proxy for the pleasure of released lustful drives and aggression rewarded by guilt-loaded punishment in the form of lost money. The gambler lusts for punishment. In German, the word is angstlust. He knows that his loss is guaranteed by unfavorable odds, yet he continues his masochistic thrills dictated by the pleasure principle, which in his case is pleasure from displeasure. Freud may have blamed Dostoyevsky's gambling on masturbation guilt and self-punishment to ease that guilt, www.capitalideasonline.com Page - 1 What makes a gambler? but other psychoanalysts had other ideas. Indeed, Bergler, for instance, claimed that the gambler has an unconscious desire to lose as a self-punishing psychic masochism reaction to the guilt-driven Oedipal conflict, an unconscious hostility toward parental figures, which may include other authority figures such as teachers. The Grandmother in Dostoyevsky's The Gambler watches a very young man at the roulette table winning heavily. She sees his eyes flashing and his hands shaking, and notes that he continuously staked without any sort of calculation, winning and winning, raking and raking in all his gains. The young man continues to stake and rake his winnings. And then we are told that the Grandmother suddenly turns to Alexis Ivanovitch, the narrator, and breathlessly exclaims, “Go and tell him-go and tell him to stop, and to take his money with him, and go home.” To the consternation of everyone, especially the croupier, she shouts, “Presently he will be losing-yes, losing everything that he has now won… the young man is done for! I suppose he WISHES to be ruined. What a fool the fellow is!” The Grandmother seems to know all about psychic masochism, pleasure from displeasure-“he WISHES to be ruined,” she says. And as we read the pages, we wonder if he ever leaves the table with anything. We are not told, for the story continues with the Grandmother's escalating excitement of the game. If belief in luck is less the wish to win than the opportunity to control what cannot be controlled, then the gambler consciously thinks he or she has control of the outcome, that he or she will win simply because there is a will to win. Yet, if the psychic masochism school is right, he or she unconsciously wishes punishment to ease his or her guilt. The pathological gambler consistently loses more than he or she wins; yet often those losses do not diminish his or her belief in control. Listen to Alexis Ivanovitch's belief in luck through a conversation between Polina Alexandrovna, the young lady with hopes of an inheritance from the Grandmother. It is fictional, not a clinical account; yet Alexis's narrative does illustrate the compulsive everygambler's strong illusion of control. He had just gone through a moderate loss in betting for Polina. “I always felt certain,” he tells Polina in a gloomy tone, “that I should win. Indeed,… [I] ask myself-Why have my absurd, senseless losses of today raised a doubt in my mind? Yet I am still positive that, so soon as ever I begin to play for myself, I shall infallibly win.” “And why are you so certain?” “To tell the truth, I do not know: I only know that I must win that it is the one resource I have left. Yes, why www.capitalideasonline.com Page - 2 What makes a gambler? do I feel so assured on this point?” “Perhaps because one cannot help winning if one is fanatically certain of doing so.” Freud felt that certain obscure laws of human behaviors are independent of culture, time, or race, and universal qualities like vision or appetite. The demonic impulses that connect Hamlet to Oedipus may very well be a poet's way of personifying the ego's subtle struggles with the real world. And so, Freud thought that pathological gambling parallels a subconscious desire to self-castigate. This may seem a stretch to the behaviorists out there, who believe Freud's theory of gambling has little merit in the light of end-of-century theories of cognition, but at the time it was something new and, like all new theories, spawned introspection, discussion, and an explosion of surrogate ideas. Many early twentieth-century psychoanalysts followed Freud's analysis of gambling, some stretching the Oedipal features to autoerotic desires. Bergler believed that when gamblers place their stakes in the attendance of luck, they are quixotically commanding a win, all in the illusion of omnipotence. Bergler would say that an addictive behavior, especially irrational gambling, is a test to control Fortune. The conscience is like a sadistic jailer who drives his prisoner to such desperation that he beats his head against the wall. At first the jailer gloats, but at the first suspicion that his victim is deriving pleasure from this self-torture, the jailer will force him to stop? Another prominent early twentieth-century psychoanalyst, Hans Von Hattingberg, connected gambling obsessions to the toddler years of toilet training, when unrestricted bowel eliminations (which he believed to be an autoerotic pleasure) suddenly become checked under toilet protocols for the first time. This discouraged pleasure emerges in adulthood as the obsessive desire to gamble-the unconscious views this as the unrestricted flow of cash. Of course, there were many more early psychoanalytic views on the nature of gambling, almost all based on subliminal grounds, many interesting from an academic point of view, and many took a clinical approach. But none supported resounding scientific evidence. Neither is there modern scientific support for theories of inherited instincts, masturbation drive, Oedipal impulses, or masochism. www.capitalideasonline.com Page - 3 What makes a gambler? Testing such theories was (and still is) difficult and expensive. Many early theories were tested on either very small sample sizes or biased samples. So what is the current thinking? Unfortunately, it is still all theoretical and inconclusive. All we can do is categorize according to camp. In the mid-I950s the leading belief was that the causes of excessive gambling could be found within the individual psyche with little credit to environmental factors. Out of Bergler's 200 cases, 80 were acute, 60 continued treatment, and 45 were completely cured (meaning that they stopped gambling, recognized their inner conflicts, and ended patterns of self-destructive behavior). Yes, Bergler cured roughly two-thirds of those sixty problem gambling patients who continued treatment, using purely psychoanalytic techniques, but some behaviorists argued that the high number of cures could have been circumstantial, that perhaps the mere clinical attention resolved their problem. Other psychoanalysts felt that many patients with multiple neuroses were convinced that gambling was a problem only after lengthy analysis. Moreover, because Bergler never mentioned any follow-ups, no one ever knew if those cures were permanent or temporary. Though there were other reports of clinical successes with patients, behavioral psychologists developed suspicions that environmental factors could play more than just a derivative role, even perhaps a fundamental, key role in determining motivation for gambling and other addictions. Even Edmund Bergler conceded that he saw one thing common to all the addict gamblers he treated in his thirty years of practice: that gambling is just one of the many unconsciously self-created, and self-perpetuated, self-damaging tragedies in their lives. Yet, at the same time, he believed that everyone in Western cultures is a potential gambler, possibly harmless or possibly dangerous.

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