244
PARTISAN REVIEW
By eleven o'clock, there remain at the roulette table only those desperate
players, the real gamblers , for whom there exists but the roulette table
... who know nothing of what is going on around them and take no
interest in any matters outside the roulette saloon, but only play and play
from morning till night, and would gladly play all round the clock if it
were permitted . These people are always annoyed when midnight comes,
and they must go home , because the roulette bank is closed . And when
the chief croupier, about 12 o'clock , just before the close calls out, " the
last three rums , gentlemen! " these men are ready
to
stake all they have in
their pockets on those last three turns , and it is certain that it is just then
that these people lose most .
Dostoevski might as well have been describing a computer room
The medical literature on compulsive gambling concerns itself mainly
with the psychogenesis of that compulsion, and then almost entirely from a
psychoanalytic perspective . It is, however, not necessary
to
recapitulate the
psychoanalytic argument here, nor would such a detour serve our present
purpose.
It
is enough
to
say here that psychoanalysts, beginning with Freud,
saw megalomania and fantasies ofomnipotence as principal ingredients in the
psychic life of the compulsive gambler. We have
to
neither accept nor reject
psychoanalytic accounts of the origins of such fantasies-e .g ., that they are
rooted in unresolved Oedipal conflicts leading to wishes to overpower the
father that in turn lead
to
unconscious motivations to fail-in order
to
join the
psychoanalysts, and novelists like Dostoevski , in seeing the central role
megalomaniac fantasies of omnipotence play in compulsive gambling .
The gambler, as the psychoanalyst Edmund Bergler states in
The
Psy–
chology ofGambling,
has three principal convictions: first, he is subjectively
certain that he will win; second, he has an unbounded faith in his own
cleverness; third, he knows that life itself is nothing but a gamble .
What grounds can there possibly be for knowing that one will win a game
of pure chance? To know that the roll of a pair of dice or the turn of a card is a
purely chance event is
to
know that nothing one does can possibly effect the
outcome . There precisely is the rub! The compulsive gambler believes himself
to
be in control of a magical world
to
which only few men are given entrance.
"He believes," writes Bergler, "fate has singled him out ... and communi–
cates with him by means of small signs indicating approval or reproach ." The
gambler is the scientist of this magical world. He is the interpreter of the signs
Fate communicates to him just as the scientist in the real world is an inter–
preter of the signs nature communicates to everyone who cares
to
become
sensitive
to
them. And, like the natural scientist, the compulsive gambler
always has a tentative hypothesis that accounts for almost all the signs he has so
far observed , that, in other words , constitutes a very nearly complete picture
of those aspects of the universe of interest
to
him . The test of the adequacy of
