“Invisible Masters: Compulsions and the Fear that Drives Them” is the title of George Weinberg’s 1995 book. Weinberg identifies unconscious fears or dread as the “invisible masters” driving compulsive habits.

Vicious cycles as invisible masters

I see these unconscious fears as being part of several vicious feedback cycles, and these cycles as the “invisible masters”.

A choice to perform the compulsive activity		Strengthens the unconscious dread that motivates the compulsive activity

Weinberg writes, “I believe that the relationships between one’s motives and behaviour go both ways” (Weinberg, 1995, p 86). I view this as an amplifying feedback cycle, and when this cycle dominates, (1) each choice to perform the compulsive habit, (2) strengthens the dread that motivates the habit, which (3) increases the choosing of the habit, and (4) the cycle repeats. There is also another cycle:

Strengthened compulsive habit		Increased damage
	Increased dread

When this cycle takes hold: (1) increased dread (2) strengthens the compulsive habit, which (3) increases the damage caused by the habit, which (4) increases the dread, and (5) the cycle repeats. I discuss how this cycle relates to Malan’s psychodynamic therapy here.

Seen like this, the self-amplifying vicious cycles become the “invisible masters”, rather than just the dread.

Weinberg’s direct effect principle

“The principle is that whenever we make a decision, we are, for a time, intensifying whichever attitudes gave rise to the decision in proportion to the contributions they have made [to the decision]” (Weinberg, 1969, p. 38)

A chosen action directly reinforces its motivating ideas and feelings independently of the indirect influences of (1) damage resulting from the action, which usually discourages the action, and (2) rewards from the action, which encourage the action.

(Weinberg, 1969, p. 38, Weinberg, 1996, p. 17; Weinberg, 1995, p. 86)

Weinberg writes that habits, repeatedly chosen actions, repeatedly reinforce their motivations, including their conscious and unconscious fears. People unknowingly renew their unconscious fears, remaking themselves in their own image through compulsive habits driven by those fears.

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.

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 and 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.

The direct effect as a Feedback Cycle

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

Perform a chosen activity		Strengthens each idea and feeling that motivates the activity, including any dread.

In this cycle: (1) performing any chosen activity tends to (2) strengthen its motivating ideas and feelings, including any motivating fears. This is Weinberg’s direct effect principle. This strengthening tends to (3) increase the likelihood that the person will repeat that action, and when it does, (4) the cycle repeats.

The opposite of this cycle also holds.

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: (1) the rejection of an activity tends to (2) weaken its motivating ideas and feelings, which tends to (3) increase the chances of the activity being rejected again, and when that rejection occurs, (4) the cycle repeats.

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.

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”.

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.

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

Habits: Ordinary and Compulsive

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

An example of a compulsive habit: Jack

Consider the compulsive habit of one of Weinberg’s clients (1995, p. 190). I’ll call him Jack. 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 in which his father corrected him by ridiculing him, while his mother just smiled. Jack was horrified at being wrong, ridiculed, and an outcast.

Jack’s compulsive habit of arguing against even the slightest criticism kept his dread of being outcast unconscious, but it also reinforced this dread. For him, his argumentativeness came to feel right and necessary, but it was an illusory solution to his problem.

I see two vicious cycles driving Jack’s compulsive habit.

Habit: He chose to argue against any criticism		This strengthened his dread of being outcast.

In this first cycle: (1) each time Jack chose to argue against criticism, even the slightest criticism, this (2) strengthened his motivating fear of being outcast, which (3) increased his arguments against criticism, and then (4) the cycle repeated.

Habit: more & 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 this second cycle was dominant: (1) his increased dread of being outcast led to (2) more of his arguing against criticism which led to (3) more damage as when he clearly made a small error, say when learning a new skill, and then argued that he was right, it gave others solid evidence to criticise his extreme defensiveness, which (4) increased his dread of being outcaste, and then (5) the cycle repeated.

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 cycle diagrams make it clear that “compulsions are reinfecting agents”.

My cyclic intervention with client Zed.

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

During a counselling session with my client Zed, I identified a vicious cycle that was a revelation to him. (Zed is a fictional client.)

You gamble more to feel respected – that’s when you are winning.		Damage: You lose more money & respect
	You need more respect.

During the session, we built a diagram of key parts of his story. The vicious cycle emerged from this diagram, and I summed it up, saying to him, “There is a cycle here: (1) the more you gamble to feel respected, while on winning streaks, (2) the more money you lose and the less respect you get at home and at work, so (3) the more you need respect, and (4) this throws you back to gamble more. This vicious cycle is making your life very difficult.”

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

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

Zed’s gambling is different from Jack’s compulsive habit: (1) Jack was unconscious of his dread, whereas Zed was conscious of his need for respect, and (2) Jack’s compulsive habit originated in his childhood, whereas Zed’s gambling problem developed while he was an adult. Despite these differences, I see the organisation of their habits as similar. Zed’s amplifying cycle linked his (1) need for respect, (2) gambling, and (3) damage. This has the same pattern as Jack’s cycle, which linked his (1) dread of being held in contempt, (2) his defensiveness, and (3) the damage. Each time they performed their habit, they strengthened its motivating ideas and feelings, generating similar amplifying feedback cycles.

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 may have feared that something was wrong with his head. Regardless of whether he was conscious, semi-conscious, or unconscious of this fear, it could have been another driver of his gambling, a self-reinforcing feedback cycle linking this dread, his gambling, and the gambling damage.

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 an Alocoholics Anonymous meeting, ” 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)

Weinberg’s terms & psychodynamics

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

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)

.

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. Changes in their behaviour can then modify their ideas and feelings.
• Psychodynamic therapy addresses a person’s feelings/dread. Changes in their feelings can then modify 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 modify their actions and feelings.

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 goals for me in my counselling practice. I have integrated some of his concepts into my systems theory understanding of my clients.

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”

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.

Loaded: 16 Dec 2025: Updated 13 March 2026