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George Weinberg offers a clear and practical account of how people continually recreate their whole psychic structure through their habitual behaviour. When a person takes a chosen action, they reinforce the ideas and feelings that motivate the action. Now, habits are repeated actions, so habits repeatedly reinforce their motivations. I present how self-amplifying feedback cycles organise this reinforcement.

Weinberg writes that people unknowingly renew their unconscious fears, remaking themselves in their own image through habits driven by those fears, compulsive habits. Yet freedom from a compulsion is possible by (1) abstaining from it, (2) attending to the clues the abstinence offers about its origins, (3) understanding the problem that the compulsion dealt with in an illusory way, (4) finding a real way to deal with that fear or sometimes seeing that it is now an unwarranted fear. We can free ourselves from a compulsion and disempower even deeply unconscious ideas and feelings. Character is pliable, not fixed.

Also, character is pliant, as people can develop new habits by acting on slight impulses that they want to strengthen.

George Weinberg (1929–2017) was a psychotherapist and educator in New York, as well as the author of 14 books. His accounts of counselling read like a good novel; one is “Invisible Masters: Compulsions and the Fear that Drives Them” (1995).

You can read about George Weinberg (Psychologist) on Wikipedia.

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The direct effect principle

Taking a chosen action reinforces each of its motivating ideas and feelings, including its unconscious motivations. This is Weinberg’s Direct Effect Principle.

The reinforcement happens independently of the indirect influences of (1) damage resulting from the action, which usually tends to discourage the action, and (2) rewards from the action, which tend to encourage the action.

(Weinberg, 1996, p. 17; Weinberg, 1995, p. 86)

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The direct effect as a Feedback Cycle

I see Weinberg’s “Direct Effect Principle” as part of a self-amplifying feedback cycle.

In this cycle:

• The upper arrow is based on Weinberg’s direct effect principle: taking a chosen action tends to strengthen its motivating ideas and feelings.
• The lower arrow shows that stronger motivation tends to increase the likelihood that the person will repeat the action.

The opposite of this cycle also holds.

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Rejecting an activity weakens motivation.

When a person chooses to act, they reject alternative actions. Each choice both strengthens the motivations for the chosen action and weakens the motivations for the rejected actions.

Reject an action		Weaken the action’s motivations.

In this cycle:

• The upper arrow shows the rejection of an activity as tending to weaken its motivating ideas and feelings.
• The lower arrow shows that weakened motivation tends to decrease the person’s repetition of the action.

Any rewards or damage resulting from the action will independently influence the motivation to repeat the activity. I have described the feedback cycles around rewards and punishment on my page on self-reinforcing feedback and human behaviour.

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Habits are repeated actions.

In a habit, people repeat the same action, thereby repeatedly:

• Reinforcing the ideas and feelings that motivate it, and
• Weakening the ideas and feelings motivating the rejected alternative actions and pushing these motivations towards extinction.

So habits have a profound impact on character, and people have hundreds of habits, like:

• making jokes or remaining serious,
• speaking loudly or softly,
• being assertive or deferential
• locking the car,
• washing hands,
• exercising,
• smoking
• gambling

These habits are each organised by the cycles described above:

• amplifying cycles due to choosing the activity and strengthening its motivations,
• amplifying cycles due to rejecting alternative actions and so weakening their motivations,
• amplifying cycles due to rewards, and
• damping cycles due to damage.

Consider one chosen action and its motivating ideas. The ideas motivating the habit of “locking the door when you are in the house” could be:

• Locking the door will stop a prowler from entering my house
• You should take simple steps to protect yourself and your things.
• I want to be safe.
• I’m not strong enough to protect myself
• Mum would like to see me doing this, just like she told me.

A separate amplifying feedback cycle forms for each of these ideas, for example:

Action: Lock the door		Strengthens the idea: I want to be safe

 
For each habit alone, there will be many feedback cycles, and the cycles of one habit often interact with those driving other habits; e.g., the habits of “driving carefully” and “locking the door” will both reinforce the idea, “I want to be safe”.

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Habits remake people in their own image.

Habits constantly reinforce a person’s ideas and feelings via amplifying feedback cycles that organise a person’s character and relationships.

People are constantly reproducing aspects of themselves – virtues, vices, fears, ways of perceiving others and themselves – by multitudinous, ongoing habits. (Weinberg, 1995, p. 189)

People unwittingly perpetuate their unconscious fears through their habits. For example, traumatic events do not turn a person into a frightened person. It is the habits they develop after the trauma, like becoming homebound, that re-infect them with the unconscious dread of a reoccurrence of the trauma, reinforcing their ideas about the world being dangerous and their fear of the dangerous world. (Weinberg 1995, p.198).

Choose to stay at home after a traumatic incident.		Strengthen the dread of the incident recurring.

The good news here is that character is not set in stone; it is pliable because people can change their ordinary and compulsive habits.

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Habits: Ordinary and Compulsive

Unconscious dread motivates compulsive habits. This table shows how compulsive habits differ from ordinary habits.

An Ordinary Habit	A Compulsive Habit
It solves a problem in a practical, realistic way.	It deals with dread symbolically or in an illusory/delusory way. It is not successful as it only buries the dread, i.e., renders it unconscious. It seemed to work for the person at some time, so they adopted it as a habit, gaining a false sense of security.
It enables a decrease in consciousness. A person performs habits effortlessly and can even do several complex things at once, such as riding a bike and talking.	It reduces consciousness of the dread.
It reinforces its motivating ideas and feelings.	It reinforces the buried motivating dread, e.g., if a person is bashed on a city street and then stays at home to avoid another attack, they reinforce the fear each time they avoid going out. It both reduces the consciousness of the dread and reinforces the buried dread.
It comes to feel right & necessary.	It comes to feel right & necessary.
Abstinence will stop the habit.	Abstinence will NOT stop the habit as the dread remains.   Abstinence brings “hunger illusions”: clues about the dread and the origin of the habit.
–	Any habit can become compulsive.

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An example of a compulsive habit: Jack

Consider the compulsive habit of one of Weinberg’s clients (1995, p. 190). Jack, I call him Jack, “snapped to defend himself against even the slightest implication of criticism … and could not remember his childhood at all”. Weinberg asked Jack to refrain from this defensiveness. After forcing himself to stay silent when people criticised him, Jack had a dream in which he was a child with his family criticising him. Then he remembered childhood episodes when his father corrected him by ridiculing him, and his mother just smiled. Jack was horrified about being wrong, ridiculed and outcast.

• Jack’s compulsive habit kept his dread of being outcast unconscious, but it also reinforced this dread.
• He managed his dread of being wrong and socially outcast by arguing against even the slightest criticism, an illusory solution.
• It came to feel right and necessary to him.
• Inevitably, when he did something wrong and argued that he was right, it gave others solid evidence to criticise him.

I see Jack’s habit reinforcing his dread in two ways. First, Jack’s choice to argue against criticism directly reinforced each of the habit’s motivations, including the motivating dread. This formed an amplifying feedback cycle.

Habit: Argue against the slightest criticism		Strengthen the dread of being wrong and outcast.

Second: The damage due to this defensive habit indirectly reinforced his dread, as people became critical of his extreme defensiveness. Whenever he was learning, made a slight mistake, and insisted he was right, it gave others solid grounds to criticise him. This formed another amplifying feedback cycle.

Habit: stronger argument against criticism		Increased damage with people fairly criticising him for arguing that black is white.
	Increased dread of being wrong and out

When a child adopts a compulsive habit to cope with a distressing situation, that habit can persist and keep their childhood fears alive.

Unconscious dread is always a motive for a compulsive activity; the activity itself not only conceals the dread, but also renews it; compulsions are reinfected agents. (Weinberg, 1995, p. 191)

This Weinberg quote, when viewed in isolation, can seem mysterious, but the amplifying feedback cycles make it clear that “compulsions are reinfecting agents”.

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My cyclic intervention with client Zed.

Consider how this relates to my client Zed and the cyclic intervention.

Here is a brief overview of the self-reinforcing feedback cycle that emerged during my example counselling session with client Zed.

Towards the end of the session, I summed it up, saying to him:

• There is a cycle here.
• The more you gamble to feel respected while you’re winning,
• the more money you lose and the less respect you get at home and at work, so
• the more you need respect, and
• this throws you back to gamble more.
• This vicious cycle is making life difficult for you.

The method for generating and using the cyclic intervention is critical: the page describing the example counselling session details this.

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Drivers of Zed’s and Jack’s habits were similar.

Zed’s gambling habit defended him from his conscious need for respect, and I deduced this from discussing his recent life with him. So, Zed’s gambling is different from Jack’s compulsive habit of being extremely defensive, which defended him from an unconscious dread that originated in his childhood. Despite these differences, I see the organisation of their habits as similar.

Zed’s amplifying cycle linking his (1) need for respect, (2) gambling, and (3) damage has the same pattern as Jack’s cycle linking his (1) dread of being held in contempt, (2) his defensiveness, and (3) the damage.

Also, each time they performed their habit, they strengthened its motivating ideas and feelings, generating similar amplifying feedback cycles.

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Zed’s possible dread of being defective.

Another way to view Zed’s gambling also fits this same pattern. I discuss this on the psychodynamics page, but in brief, Zed could have feared that there was something wrong with his head, and this could have been another driver of his gambling, a self-reinforcing feedback cycle linking this dread, his gambling, and the gambling damage.

Defence: Zed gambles more for the wins, to feel like a smart professional gambler		More Damage: Zed knows he’s losing money and feels crazy.
		More Dread: Something is wrong with my head

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Hunger Illusions & Dread

Weinberg studied the thoughts and feelings that arose in people as they first refrained from their problematic habit and “hungered” for their habit. He called them hunger illusions. These illusions could reveal themselves in dreams or in what might seem like illogical excuses to resume the habit. Weinberg gives an example of a hunger illusion.

 
A man who had been dry for three weeks said sincerely to a roomful of people, ” I’m really worried that if I don’t sit down and drink with my family and friends during Christmas, they’ll think I’m a snob and that I hate them.” Everyone in the room laughed out loud. “But it’s only July”, someone reminded him. … The thought came from the centre of his being. … The man had begun drinking in his teens to get close to people and prove that he was not a snob. … the ideas that come to people’s minds when they break habits can make no sense, even as excuses. They are … reasons that the person had had in the past when he or she began the behaviour. (Weinberg, 1995, p. 185)

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Weinberg’s terms & psychodynamics

Weinberg’s compulsive habits are akin to psychodynamic defence mechanisms, but Weinberg and Malan use different terms.

Weinberg’s term	Malan’s term
Compulsive habit Symbolic solution	Defence
Dread Horrifying idea	A Hidden feeling. Unacceptable impulse. Mental pain. Mental conflict.
Not used	Anxiety

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The interaction of psychodynamics & CBT

The feedback cycles between a chosen action and its motivations suggest how Cognitive therapy, Behavioural therapy, and Psychodynamic therapies can each influence a person’s actions, feelings and ideas.

The Victorian Government’s “Gambling Research Panel” report, “Best Practice in Problem Gambling Services”, wrote about my social work thesis:

The framework provides a structure for understanding how cognitive therapy, behavioural therapy, and psychodynamic therapy can influence problem gambling. It suggests that each therapy tackles problem gambling by breaking the amplifying loops underlying it in different places.

• Cognitive therapy strategies tackle the pro-gambling mentality, denial, and self-tricking thinking, and thereby the gambling and the worries.
• Behavioural therapy strategies tackle the gambling behaviour, and thereby the ideas and worries.
• Psychodynamic therapy strategies tackle the dread, and thereby the ideas and gambling.

(Jackson, Thomas, and Blaszczynski: 2003, p 87, 88)

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The table below shows the amplifying feedback cycles between a chosen action and the motivating ideas and feelings that drive it. Behind any chosen action, there will be separate cycles for each of the many motivating ideas and feelings, conscious and unconscious.

Reinforce the action’s motivating ideas.		Take a chosen action.		Reinforce the action’s motivating feelings.
Cognitive therapy tackles the pro-gambling mentality and denial.		Behavioural Therapy tackles the gambling behaviour.		Psycho-dynamic Therapy tackles the hidden feelings/dread.

The left columns show the interaction between actions and ideas, while the right columns show the interaction between actions and feelings.

• Behavioural therapy addresses a person’s actions, e.g., gambling. Changes in their behaviour can then change their ideas and feelings.
• Psychodynamic therapy addresses a person’s feelings/dread. Changes in their feelings can then change their actions and ideas.
• Cognitive therapy addresses a person’s ideas, e.g. denial of the damage caused by their gambling. Changes in their thinking can then change their actions and feelings.

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Wind Up

Many feedback cycles organise a single voluntary action or habit, and people have many habits, so there is a complex of interacting feedback cycles that spread any change across a person’s acting, thinking, and feeling. Actions, particularly habits, reinforce their motivations, so human character is pliant. This begins to build an understanding of human character based on self-reinforcing and damping feedback cycles.

This theory is open to testing. Counsellors can follow in Weinberg’s footsteps and (1) examine the hunger illusions of their clients, (2) see if this reveals details about the origins of the client’s problematic behaviour, and (3) see if this assists clients in limiting their behaviour.

Weinberg’s concepts gave me a solid basis for understanding problem gambling and offered constructive ways for me to develop my counselling practice. I integrated some of his concepts into my systems theory understanding of my clients.

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DSM and Compulsive Gambling

Weinberg uses the term “compulsive gambling”. This is consistent with the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, DSM-3R, which states that excessive gambling “may be referred to as compulsive”; however, DSM-5 TR (2022) says only some individuals with obsessive-compulsive disorder may exhibit “compulsive gambling”

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Counselling Pages & References

The introduction to my counselling pages includes:

• Links to the other counselling pages, including those describing how this approach relates to other counselling practices and theories, see the top of the introduction page
• References for all the counselling pages, at the end of the introduction page.

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Loaded: 16 Dec 2025: Updated 25 Dec 2025