Bending the the Gambling Curve

In the San Francisco Bay Area, there currently exist Recovery Inc., Alcoholics Anonymous, Business Failures Anonymous, Gamblers Anonymous - the list proliferates endlessly.

By way of hyperbole, a drinking gambler who has lost his business and tried to kill himself, can easily become one of the most popular men in the city.

Parenthetically, these groups should be distinguished from the customary kind of group therapy in which, hopefully, the group is not a substitute for life and, ideally, the group fashions insights rather than buddies.

The strategy in groups like Gamblers Anonymous is to acclaim kinship through symptom-formation and in the process of striving for a radical democracy seeks to obliterate subcultural differences.

If symptoms initiate contact and affirm brotherhood, it is necessary to attempt at the same time a rejection of external values which are based in such large part of the narcissism of small differences.

It is in this sense that such groups are explicitly and avowedly apolitical because any consideration of large-scale social conflicts revives a whole range of status differentiations which it is the purpose of the group to deny.

To achieve fraternity and a derivative identity simply and exclusively because one is a compulsive gambler - is an accomplishment that cannot be risked by attributing equivalent importance to oneself as a Protestant or Democrat or workingman.

Besides, these other aspects of identity have resulted only in isolation, and it is tantalizing to prophesy that future members of these therapy groups will conjure up symptoms or at least exaggerate them in order to obtain admission.

It should be stressed that the attempted radical democracy of groups like GA is not without its strains. There is certainly more ambivalence toward the values of the external world than the members care to verbalize, and these values keep intruding despite the members' good intentions.

Officially, the habitual two-dollar approval as the big plunger, but there is little doubt that added status is conferred on the man who has lost large sums.

Thus, there is the man who claims not to have gambled in two years, but in eight months' time, the losses he mentioned in his various weather reports climbed almost imperceptibly from $65,000 to $85,000.

Another man is adept at mentioning his cousin who is supposedly a very distinguished specialist in New York City, a reminder of an earlier, more innocent period when a benevolent Providence o arranged the affairs of this country that almost every Jewish physician was a top man in his field.

Still, others manifest a touching naivete with respect so social processes in spite of, or possibly because of their self-proclaimed ability to con anybody out of anything.