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Man tends to respond to traumatic experience—whether it be illness or, as in Niederland's patients, exile—by regressing, by turning back emotionally in an attempt to recapture some earlier time in life when he was comfortable and free from noxious experiences with which he is now beset.
In the course of regression to successively earlier levels of emotional development and experience, old and partially resolved conflicts are reactivated. Among these revived conflicts are those of adolescence, chief among which is the final working through of the oedipal relationship with the goal of appropriate identification with the parent of the same sex. It is here that I believe Niederland's emphasis on depression in gamblers omits an important facet of depression.
One of the commonest symptoms encountered in adolescents who are working through the final phases of the oedipal state, and hence their appropriate identification, is alternating depression and euphoria, i.e., mood swings. These are due to the adolescent's repeated efforts to repress—in the case of males—the infantile identification with mother and embrace with full force the father or other appropriate male figure as model and hero.
When, in the course of this adolescent tug-of-war, the youth succeeds in behaving in a manner consistent with his own sex, a mood of mild or intense euphoria develops, its degree depending upon the amplitude of his swings between active masculine and passive feminine behavior. When, however, his behavior—which includes thinking and feeling—imitates that of the opposite sex, a depression occurs. I have confirmed these observations both in the analysis of adolescents and, somewhat more dramatically, in brief psychotherapy with gifted adolescents by a simple interpretation of this state of affairs. It is sometimes startling to see how rapidly a depression will dissipate if the adolescent patient grasps and takes to heart the implications of the interpretation.
On the other hand, an adult gamble