About the Contributors

Title A Contribution to the Psychology of Gambling

Author William G. Niederland, M.D.

He is Training and Supervisory Analyst, Division of Psychoanalytic Education at the State University of New York and Clinical Associate Professor of Psychiatry at the University's Downstate Medical Center. Dr. Niederland also is Chief Consulting Psychiatrist to the Altro Health and Rehabilitation Services, New York City.

Iago Galdston, M.D.

Director of Psychiatric Training for the State of Connecticut Department of Mental Health. Formerly Secretary of the New York Academy of Medicine Committee on Special Studies for more than 30 years, Dr. Galdston has been in private practice for nearly 40. Two of his contributions bearing upon the subject under review are “The Psychodynamics of the Triad, Alcoholism, Gambling and Superstition” and “The Gambler and His Love.”

Ralph R. Greenson, M.D.

Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at U.C.L.A. and Scientific Director of the Foundation for Research in Psychoanalysis, Beverly Hills, California. He is a Past President of the Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Society and Institute. “On Gambling” and many other of his 25 published papers concern the different ways the neurotic struggles against depression. Dr. Greenson acknowledges that some of his clinical observations on gambling come from a monthly “Gambling Seminar” (poker game) he has participated in for several years with some of his psychoanalytic colleagues.

Edward E. Harkavy, M.D.

He has been in the private practice of psychiatry and psychoanalysis for 30 years. By chance—and the pressure of poverty—he discovered that gambling was less fatiguing than selling his blood for transfusions while in medical school and through residency. The discussion of his case presentation “The Psychoanalysis of a Gambler” by the physician who had referred the case (himself a specialist in delinquency, and a friend and disciple of Aichorn) concluded with the words, “I have never before seen a compulsive gambler cured