The Arcades Project - Operi

strain of knowing that her life is ruined, and finally she returns to her family, a
dying woman." S. Kracauer, Jacques Offe nbach uncl clas Paris seiner Zeit (Amsterdam,
1937), pp. 385-386. The comedy Les Filles de marbre was an answer to
Dumas' La Dame aux camelias of t.he year before. 16 [010a,7J
'-'-The gamhler is driven by essent.ially narcissistic and aggressive desires for omnipotence.
These, insofar as they are not immediately linked to directly erotic
desires, are characterized hy a greater temporal radius of extension. A direct
desire for coitus may, through orgasm, he satisfied more rapidly than the narcissist-aggressive
desire for omnipotel1te. The fact that genital sexuality, in even the
most favorable cases, leaves a residue of dissatisfaction goes hack, in turn, to three
facts: not all pregenital desires, such as later are subsidiary to genitality, can he
aceommodated in coitus; and from the standpoint of the Oedipus complex, the
object is always a surrogate. Together with these two ... considerations goes . ..
the fact that the impossihility of acting out large-scale unconscious aggression
contrihutes to the lack of satisfaction. The aggression abreacted in coitus is very
much domesticated . . . . Thus it happens that the narcissistic and aggressive
fiction of omnipotence becomes ahove all a cause of suffering: whoever on that
account has experienced the mechanism of pleasure as abreacted in games of
chance, and possessing, as it were, eternal value, succumhs the more readily to it
in proportion as he is committed t.o the '-neurot.ic pleasure in duration' (Pfeifer);
and, as a consequence of pregenital fixations , he is less able to assimilate such
pleasure to normal sexuality . ... It should also be borne in mind that, according
to Freud, the sexualit.y of human beings bears the stamp of a function that dwindles,
whereas this cannot in any way be predicated of the aggressive and narcissistic
tendencies." Edmund Bergler, '-'-Zur Psychologie des Hasardspielers," Imago,
22, no. 4 (1936), Pl'. 438-440. [011,1]
"''The game of chance represents the only occasion on which the pleasure principle,
Hnd the omnipotence of its thoughts and desires, need not be renoun(ed, and on
which the reality principle offers no advantages over it. In this retention of the
infantile fiction of omnipotence lies posthumous aggression against the . .. authority
which has 'inculcated' the realit.y principle in the child. This unconscious
aggression, together with the operHtion of the omnipotence of ideas and the experience
of the socially viable repressed exhibition, conspires to form a triad of pleasures
in gambling. This triad stands opposed to a triad of punishments constituted
from out of the unconscious desire of loss, the unconscious homosexual desire for
domination, and the defamation of society . ... At the deepest level, the game of
chance is love's w.ill to be extorted by an unconscious masochistic design. This is
why the gambler always loses in the long run." Edmund Bergler, '-'ZUl' Psychologic
des Hasardspieiers," Imago, 22, no. 4 (1936), p. 440. [011,2]
Brief account of Ernst Simmel's ideas on the psychology of the gamhler: ''-The
insatiable greed that finds no rest within an unending vicious circle, where loss
becomes gain and gain hecomes loss, is said to arise from the narcissistic compul-