Explaining Gambling Behavior
Gambling is viewed as fulfilling an oracular function.
Since oedipal guilt can never be fully expiated, however, Otto Fenichel (1945) concluded that true gamblers must inevitably be ruined.
Their endless quest for forgiveness can never be realized. R. Greenson, drawing on clinical data from five patients, in 1948 identified gamblers as being orally fixated.
He observed that gamblers seek from 'lady Luck' the favorable treatment that they haven't received from their parents.
Greenson concluded that the impulse to gamble cannot be satisfied by fantasizing but must be acted upon; that is, the gambler must continue to play.
Robert Lindner, noted author of The Rebel without a Cause and The Fifty Minute Hour, presented an important psychoanalytic study in 1953.
After analysis of a single patient, Lindner theorized that gamblers are caught in an unsatisfactory appeal to destiny as they wrestle with such questions as: 'Did I kill my father by wishing his death?' (or in the case of gamblers with living male parent: 'Are my desires strong enough to cease my father's existence?') and : 'Will I suffer or redeemed for my hidden carnal desires?'
Lindner portrayed the gambler's dilemma as unresolvable. On the one hand, winning serves to revive guilt for oedipal desires; on the other hand, losing is tangible proof of punishment for those desires.
Early psychoanalytic studies culminated in the research of Edmund Bergler. His investigations were the most carefully documented work undertaken by a psychoanalyst and represent a veritable compendium of psychiatric observation.
Bergler's theoretical statements have attained public, and he remains one of the most widely quoted sources on gambling.
In 1957, Bergler published The Psychology of Gambling, which described his thirty-year career treating troubled gamblers. His research was based on sixty gamblers he personally treated and on the brief contacts he had with several hundred more.
Bergler's major contention was that compulsive gamblers are neurotics driven by an instructive desire to punish themselves by rebelling against the rationality of adult authority.
The anguish of losing is eroticized into a chronic masochism that the compulsive gambler craves with uncontrollable passion, becoming unable also to control his or her gambling.
Bergler contended that such gamblers are in the grips of an illness and should be accorded medical treatment rather than moral condemnation.
Like other psychiatrists, Bergler did not believe that economic gain was a determining factor in the decision to gamble. He felt that gamblers are orally fixated, unconsciously provoking situations in which they will be defeated and then self-pityingly blaming their plight on a cruel fate.
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