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The Psychological Angle of a Gambler

One explanation for gambling is seen as a way of getting control over fate and fortune. Certainly the equipment of casino gambling--- the kind most likely to appeal to the amateur--- is based on age-old symbols of fate, luck, and destiny.

The renaissance thought of fortune itself as a wheel, always turning to bring the mighty down and lift the lowly up, if one could only wait long enough. But an important part of the idea of the Wheel of Fortune is that no mere human agent could have any effect on it.

The only possible response to the running wheel was resignation--- what will be, will be. Fortune or luck is just exactly that area of life over which there can be no human control. Yet superstitious people, past and present, persist in believing that somehow they are special.

Without understanding, they still hope to happen onto the behavior that can make the wheel turn to their will.

Perhaps this is why the most superstitious forms of gambling--- the ones with the largest element of pure luck--- still appeal to people who are relatively powerless in other spheres of existence. Since there are no experts in luck, even the lowliest down-and-outer can believe, maybe, that he or she may have the key.

Freud saw the human struggle for power and control as having its roots in the family, especially in the son's struggle to be free of the dominance of his father. This formula seemed to work fairly well in application to Dostoevsky, in whom Freud was interested. Is compulsive gambling, then, an endless acting out of the impossible wish to control the controller, to dominate the indomitable?

Those who think along these lines find significance in the fact that the most valuable cards in the deck form a kind of archetypal family--- mother, father, son--- and in much of the other social and sexual paraphernalia that has clustered around games of chance.

In this formulation, then, the addicted gambler is presumed to be someone who has not successfully negotiated the difficult passages of childhood to emerge into an integrated adulthood.

He is fixated, in Freud's term, arrested in an everlasting struggle characteristic of some earlier period of psychic development. Something like this was Freud's view of the great Russian novelist, Dostoevsky.

An entirely different explanation is offered by modern behaviorist theory. The emphasis here's on the environment--- what's going on outside the gambler--- rather than on speculations about the structure of his or her psyche.