Hades' embrace and the pathological gambler's experience of death-rebirt

Abstract

The paper presents Gambling Disorder within a Jungian perspective. In all cultures, one archetypical image is God creating the world as he plays, and play is a place of transformation and meaning par excellence, where the individual can find space for creativity and potentiality. For children, play is a primary activity that regulates normal psychic development; for adults, it is a potential space where oneself and one's potential can be rediscovered.

Perhaps it is an exasperated and mad paidia that characterizes pathological gambling, where, within the rules and rituals that are obeyed to the extreme, freedom is between chance and necessity.

The land of Hades is the land of the pathological gambler, where time is no longer, where there is no progress or change, an eternal present realm with no vision of the future, only death.

The analytic relationship can help find a clearing in the complex inner negotiation that led to the pathology, where a different way of being that person can be imagined, where the psychologist is an 'activator of images' (Pedraza) that accompanies the individual towards integrating the illness into his whole psyche.