The gambler is a neurotic with an unconscious wish to lose. His logically senseless conviction that he will win is an expression of the fiction of omnipotence in the child who escaped destruction in a real experience. Gambling also activates the latent rebellion against logic, morals and renunciation, a rebellion which is based on the inwardly unrelinquished pleasure principle. Heavy inner retaliation and an unconscious tendency toward self-punishment follow his unconscious aggression. He cannot win in the long run because losing is necessary for his psychic equilibrium.

The gambler is a person who has made an oral regression and constantly uses the 'mechanism of orality' which Bergler describes as follows: First, he unconsciously provokes a situation in which he is refused. Secondly, he throws himself, full of hatred and semingly in self-defense, against his self-constructed enemy. Thirdly, he revels in self-pity, enjoying unconscious psychic masochistic