"In a haunting novel about gambling, Dostoyevski's hero reaches his hand out to gain caresses from older seductresses prior to making a series of losing bets at the gambling table. Freud's take on Dostoyevski's antihero is that the 'vice' of masturbation is replaced later in life by addiction to gambling. The mixed feelings of passion for playing the game and guilt for being impassioned with the game are the equivalent to a childhood compulsion to masturbate. Edmund Bergler, an American student of Freud, extends this theory to say that gambling replaces the feeling of guilt from a boy's Oedipal longing for his mother. For an adult gambler, losing becomes "self-punishment" for early transgressions. In a desire to rectify these transgression, the gambler then wants to lose."
-Victor Niederhoffer The Education of a Speculator (pp. 181-182)
No comments:
Post a Comment