ABSTRACT
Risk-taking for Daniel Defoe was irresistible; always he would choose to operate off-piste. “As a businessman”, his latest biographer concedes, “he was essentially a gambler, excited by new deals, new prospects. What we see in many of the speculations is an almost compulsive interest in taking risks.” Risk-taking aimed at loss, gambling to lose, is a phenomenon explored in some revealing and startling asides within S. Freud’s essay Dostoevsky and Parricide. Freud found the causality of the compulsive gambler’s habit in a particular variation of the Oedipus complex, one in which the negative and inverted elements play a malign role; it was one which in Defoe, as in Dostoevsky, had a shattering impact on adult life. From dangers we gain our thrills; but from the ultimate risk, that of emasculation which was the threat menacing Defoe, as all compulsive gamblers, we seek to distance ourselves; our thrills are less intensive, the dangers we court less threatening.
