The Megalomania in Us; the Gambler
The psychology of consciousness is a medium not useful enough for the task of discovering the complicated personality of the gambler.
If we stay on the conscious level, we hastily reach a confrontation of rationalizations and illogical reasoning.
To take the gambler's own theory of his motives at face value is as naïve as it is to the eye of a microscope. Just as the microscope presents the multitudes of dangerous bacilli that may stay in a drop of pure water, the psychology of the unconscious presents facts hidden in the gambler's being.
The best stance to the problem of the gambler's unconscious psychology is, first, to go into his illogical, senseless reality that he will win.
It is actually impossible to match this authoritative self-assurance with an analogous attitude on the part of an average individual leading a normal life.
Such episode like this can be found only among pathological fanatics. Fanaticism is a megalomaniacal state, and the gambler, in his anticipation, is a fanatic too.
The conformation of this megalomania can best be comprehended by transiently examining a casual phenomenon of the psychology of the child: the drama of omnipotence.
Both noted psychoanalysts Freud and Sandor Ferenezi have shown that the child evolves in a sort of megalomania for an extended period; he is only aware of one yardstick, and that is his overinflated ego.
He gathers of the outside world as something over which he has total control. This delusion of reality is cherished by his parents, who accordingly attempt to fulfill his every wish for basic needs.
This fulfillment of his physical and emotional desires, the child acknowledges, not as the result of his mother's love, but as the result of his own omnipotence.
Genuine experience gradually destroys this fiction, an experience which is most likely the deepest disappointment of childhood.
A classic example of this childhood megalomania is presented in Jean Christophe, a novel by Romain Rolland. Here, it describes the instantaneous phase in the child's development, just as if he were explaining a clinical case.
Reality coerces the child to yield that he is not an omnipotent magician, but he still must save at least a cramped part of his cherished fiction.
It is as if someone, looking at his watch at one minute to three, were to command the watch to point to three in exactly one minute, and then - his command obeyed - were to feel powerful.
To become an adult in the truest sense of the word means to abandon the pleasure principle (by Freud) for the reality principle.
The child is learned, through affection, persuasion, and threats, to understand that there is an objective reality outside the world of his private wishes.
But no one acknowledges this harsh truth without rebelling deep down inside, and the clinical fact remains that only with great uncertainty and hardship does the child give up his fantasies of omnipotence.
Truth of the matter is, we all have what was left of this fiction in our consciousness, no matter how mature we are.