Gambling and Masoschism
At the level of individual dynamics, the paucity of historical information about Gamblers Anonymous members precludes any attempt to recreate the quintessential gambler.
Probably a fruitless task, in any case - but any discussion of dynamics still necessitates a resume of some of the more frequently cited psychoanalytic accounts of gambling.
Freud's views on gambling addiction were presented as a kind of postscript to the paper on 'Dostoevsky and Parricide.'
The article is admittedly disjointed and Freud explains in a letter to Theodore Reik that it was written reluctantly at the behest of a friend.
In any event, Dostoevsky is presented as a person with a particularly intense masochistic character structure whose need for penance derived from death-wishes toward a very severe father.
One of the more interesting aspects of Dostoevsky's gambling was that he apparently never wrote more or better than when he has lost all his money, that is, when his guilt had been assuaged by self-inflicted punishment.
Freud illustrates the addiction to gambling as a masturbatory equivalent by an analysis of Stefan Zweig's short story, Twenty-four Hours in a Woman's Life.
Much is made of the feverish activity of the hands while gambling and Freud asserts that the gambler-hero is saying, 'if my mother only knew what dangers masturbation involves me in, she would certainly save me from them by allowing me to lavish all of my own tenderness on her own body.'
The article concludes with a statement that the relation between the effort to suppress masturbation and the fear of the father is well-known.
There is no mention of Dostoevsky's partially autobiographical short novel, The Gambler, in which the 'two-headed devil' is prominently featured.
The story in brief concerns a young man with a strong masochistic attachment to the daughter of the household he serves as a tutor.
The hero importunes the girl constantly to command him to kill himself, so that there can be no doubt of his devotion to her.
He is seized with a premonition of good luck and goes off to the Casino where he amasses a sizable sum of money. He presents the money to the girl who rejects him, and the money with the accusation that he is trying to buy her.
Later, he takes up the life of an inveterate gambler and does not think once of the woman with whom he had been in love until by chance, he runs into an old friend who informs him of the girl's recent serious illness.
He shows perfunctory interest, gets some money from his friend, and goes off to resume his gambling.
Consciously or unconsciously, he believes in his right to ask fate for special privileges, and he mistakes his strong yearnings for a lost omnipotence for the feeling that he is, in fact, omnipotent.
Luck and fate, are derived from mother, or father images and gambling offers an opportunity for the revival of unconscious Oedipal fantasies.
In addition, gambling offers satisfaction possibilities for latent and unconscious homosexual, anal-sadistic, oral-receptive drives, and gratification of unconscious needs for punishments.