Maria Konnikova’s The Biggest Bluff focuses on trying to determine what role dumb luck plays in poker and other aspects of life. By weaving together recent experiments in psychology and neuroscience, she provides insights into how to become a more successful player, but what is often left unexplained are the limits of psychology itself. As a trained psychoanalyst who plays poker, I believe it will be instructive to clearly distinguish psychoanalysis and psychology to provide a better understanding of what makes us think and act the way we do. Although some people may think that there are no real important differences between these two approaches, it is important to see how neuroscience and cognitive psychology often present a false picture of the human mind.
While it is now popular to think about the different mental processes that are not conscious or intentional, what psychoanalysis adds to our understanding of the unconscious is the theory of repression. According to Freud, the reason why we are not aware of why and how we do things is not primarily derived from our lack of insight into our inherited mental programs. Rather, what causes the unconscious is our desire to escape from our own reality. Since we seek to maximize pleasure and escape from tension and conflict, we tend to repress any experience or thought that makes us uncomfortable. Moreover, in order to protect a positive self-image for ourselves and for others, we rewrite our memories in order to look good. For example, when people tell bad beat stories, they often leave out important details, and when people go to talk to a coach to improve their game, they often lie about their actions so that they can feel good about themselves.
Deceptive bad beat stories thus have very little to do with instinctual reactions or cultural biases. Instead, what really shapes our behavior is self-deception. In fact, due to the fact that we lie to ourselves, we also lie to others, and this problem of repression undermines a lot of psychological research relying on accurate self-reporting. For instance, when polls ask people to reveal their prejudices or their political preferences, the results are often tainted by the lack of honesty of the respondents. Therefore, we have to take with a grain of salt a lot of the psychological results Konnikova presents.
As someone trained in neuroscience, she is greatly invested in the idea that much of our mental life is shaped by instincts inherited through natural selection and hard-wired into our brains. However, psychoanalysis teaches us that humans are never guided purely by instincts because unlike other animals, our preferences are not completely pre-determined. Human beings always have a choice and an element of free will, even if they are relying on biological programs. For instance, humans can turn any object or action into a source of pleasure, and so they are not simply following the path of neurotransmitters. Importantly, the fact that we do have a certain level of free will means that we are always responsible for our actions even though we often try to blame our problems and mistakes on our genes. Thus, although some people want to think that addictions are a disease and some people are born to be reckless gamblers, there is always a social and personal aspect to our compulsive actions.
Even when someone comes from a family of addicts, one still can make different choices and gain control over inherited predispositions. Furthermore, it is clear that most addicts turn to compulsive behavior in order to escape feelings of guilt, shame, and anxiety. This defense against accepting a negative self-image cannot be explained by biology, genes, instincts, or even natural selection. Unlike other animals, humans not only have free will, but they also have cultural moralities that frame the way their impulses are experienced. From this perspective, feelings of guilt, shame, and anxiety combine biology with psychology and culture. Since we can only feel guilty if we are responsible, then it is essential to think about the social context of our emotions.
Effective poker players know that they have to control their emotions and not get too high or too low, but many still do not understand what emotions are. While Konnikova tends to see emotions as biological reactions or psychological biases, psychoanalysis tells us that emotions are often the result of repression, displacement, and substitution. In other words, we are often angry about something else that we do not want to admit to ourselves, and so we find a substitute target for our rage. Here we see that when people go on tilt, they are not just responding to a particular event. Their responses are shaped by a whole set of previous experiences and social and personal interpretations of those events. Psychologists tend to flatten out the complexity of human emotions by searching for a simple cause and a determined effect.
Psychoanalysis teaches us that since we are not pre-programmed by nature, and our minds can replace any real event with a fictional fantasy, we are unlike any other animals. The complexity, ambiguity, and ambivalence of our feelings echo the diversity of our representations. While for an animal, an object means one thing and only one thing, for a human, an object or event can mean many different things at the same time. For example, when someone tells a bad beat story, they are not only looking for sympathy, but they are also trying to escape responsibility as they seek to present a positive self-image to others and to themselves. Furthermore, it is unclear what people hope to get out of telling these stories since even if someone else says they feel their pain and the victim was incredibly unlucky, the pain still lasts. Psychoanalysis tells us that people like to take on the identity of being a victim because the victim is always innocent and right, and you cannot criticize the victim whose reactions are always justified. Of course, this victim identification functions without awareness and intention because its origins have been repressed.
One of the goals of psychoanalysis is to help people overcome their victim fantasies and identities, but the analyst cannot simply tell the patient what to do because one of the problems that people have is their need to make other people responsible for their lives. For instance, one reason why many people spend a great deal of money on poker coaching is that they think the other person has the answer, and if the expert just tells them what to do, they will become a more successful player. In psychoanalysis, we call this dependency transference because responsibility is transferred from the patient to the analyst. Just as Konnikova presents Eric Seidel as a wise expert who always seems to know the right thing to say, we seek out gurus because we want to be saved from our own lack of understanding. We also want others to take responsibility for our failures so that we can remain innocent victims of bad luck. To counter this form of transference, psychoanalysts have to refuse to respond to the patient’s demand for advice or empathy so that the patient can take full responsibility and stop trying to escape from the reality of their lives.
