Dostoyevsky's book, "The gambler," describes a representative case of pathological gambling. The history of the main character, Aleksei Ivanovitch, shows the typical evolution of the disorder in three well defined phases: profits, losses and despair. Based on Freud's concept of narcissism and the concepts of the self psychology by Heinz Kohut, Donald Winnicott and Wilfred Bion, the contributions of psychoanalysis to the understanding of pathological gambling are discussed.
Pathological gambling; Dostoyevsky; psychoanalysis; narcissism