Gambling and its Pleasure Principle
Another life experience assures the child that certain facts are immovable.
Subsequently trying a few times later, he gathers that it does not pay to run his head into a stone wall; the wall, albeit his authority that it give way, stays unyielding.
Also in a form of careful mechanism, he learns to bypass battle when downfall is predictable.
He gets astute, but without eagerness. It is cached deep within him, is the old fiction of domination that can be alleviated under certain circumstances - very similar like Homer's deceased heroes in Hades, resurrected once more when they drank blood.
Reality principle's ability lies in the truth that its acceptance by the child, and later the adult, casts out the many defeats.
However, there is a distinct situation in life in which the reality principle - gambling. Unseen chance rules, change which in games of flawless gambling cannot be stimulated by deductive reasoning and intelligence.
Unconsciously though, gambling revives, therefore, the old childish desire of megalomania and grandeur. Moreover, it energizes the latent rebellion against logic, brilliance, morality, moderation, and abandonment.
Pleasure principle is not at all relinquished, on the whole; traces of it, weak or strong, often stays in the unconscious. Every now and then, the contained urge to give up to it turns out a propelling tendency, which leads the person to ironically disdain at all the rules of life he has gathered from schooling and experience.
The aftermath of this, is heavy retaliation. Back when the child has learned these rules from his old folks and their representatives (priests, teachers, superiors, and so forth), his defiance activates a deep unconscious feeling of guilt.
In clinical terms, this is the intellective situation of the gambler: first, unconscious belligerence; second, an unconscious propensity toward self-punishment because of that aggression.
The self-punishing aspect, which is often present, is almost never recognized except in psychoanalytic treatment. Thus, the childlike unconscious, neurotic misapprehension of the entire gambling process creates a vicious and never ending circle.
Hence, the internal necessity to be careless.
In losing, he is simply paying the price for this belligerence. Long analytic experience teaches us that in neurotics is compensated for by some form of self-punishment.
The entire concept of neurosis is based on the awareness that neurotics unconsciously transfer conflicts, genuinely experienced with their parents, to unsuspecting individuals whom they unconsciously identify with their parents.
Since aggression toward the father and mother was prohibited, each aggression toward the proxies is inwardly prohibited, too.
If the aggression is in fact, performed, it is absolved by severe self-punishment.