To Reform or To Take Control?
To return to Gamblers' Anonymous - there is no way of knowing whether they are fairly representative of gamblers, or have to be considered of its own kind.
One distinct impression is that they are very dependent on their wives who serve as a provisionally nurturant Greek chorus during the meetings and smile benignly when promises of reformation and restitution are made.
Both the gambling and the unverbalized infidelities represent abortive attempts at emancipation which must fail because independence from their wives cannot be sustained.
If there is a certain interchangeability between gambling and sexual exploits, as suggested.
Say, by the phallic language of gambling in such phrases as 'the big score,' the consequent fear of loss of support, if the person is successful either in gambling or extramarital adventures, is of crucial importance.
One of the reasons, then, why the wives have such a vested interest in their husbands' abstention from gambling, is their fear that the husbands will, in fact, make a big score.
The group culture is decidedly empathic in its continual protestation of the need to lose, but very few people need to lose that intensely, consistently, and compulsively.
The repetitive, public declaration of that need is partly an act of confession which sets the stage for the help that the group can provide, but, in addition, it is a ceremonial device intended to express resignation and surrender in the battle between the sexes.
In brief, there is a need to lose other than the one they are talking about.
Certainly, the adoption of humanistic position makes it easy to inveigh against the sentimentality, the facile cynicism, and the lack of any serious attempt to achieve a deepened self-awareness in this particular group.
However, judgmental and therapeutic stances need not necessarily coincide.
There is still the criterion of the group's effectiveness in producing a diminution of distress. On this affair, it has very little direct evidence except for the frequent statements in the weather reports that described a newly acquired tranquility.
A cab driver, one of the group members - was the most friendly, spoke often in casual conversations of a sense of purpose in life which the group had given him.
He believed that he had undergone a moral transformation which now made it possible for him to meet people without thinking in terms of exploiting them.
Most of the restlessness and instability of his earlier life was ascribed to a 'dog eat dog' view, which he still believed to be the dominant value in the lives of most people, but had now been renounced by him, in favor of a more trusting, less exploitative approach to the world.
He had no explanation for the way in which this change had been effected, but there was little doubt that the group had dispelled, at least temporarily - those aspects of his inferiority feelings which were associated with social status.