Original scientific paper
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19220990
Conscience, Meaning and Hope in the Gambler's and the Child's Concept of Reality
Luka Maršić
orcid.org/0009-0008-0193-7379
; Department of Psychiatry, Sestre milosrdnice University Hospital Centre, Zagreb
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* Corresponding author.
Abstract
This paper develops a clinical and anthropological account of the child-gambler as a paradigmatic pathological type of postmodern culture. It is argued that postmodern hypervisualization and the technologically mediated disintegration of customary identity produce individuals developmentally arrested at a pre-responsible, pre-reflective emotional register, structurally equivalent to a juvenile mode of existence. In this condition hope as an anthropological category, a forward-directed openness toward meaningful future states grounded in free action, is replaced by a degenerated structural imitation of hope in which the gambler's anticipatory excitement reproduces the form of hope while evacuating its content. Drawing on Frankl's system of logotherapy, Plessner's eccentric positionality and Scheler's theory of sublimation, the paper proposes that logotherapeutic intervention must operate simultaneously at the level of the individual, the family and the cultural environment, establishing the conditions for an authentic search for meaning through the reconstruction of the membranes of customary identity that postmodern society has systematically destroyed.
Keywords
Hrčak ID:
348958
URI
Publication date:
1.6.2026.
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