Roger Money-Kyrle

Money-Kyrle was born in Hertfordshire in 1898. He was the fourth child of the son of Audley and Florence Money-Kyrle. Sent to boarding school aged 10 and graduating from Eton aged 18, he immediately enlisted in the Royal Flying Corps during the First World War. He was shot down once in Northern France. At the end of the war, he resumed his studies at Trinity College, Cambridge, pursuing a bachelor's degree in physics and mathematics, then shifting his attention to philosophy. He became interested in psychoanalysis, and began analysis with Ernest Jones in 1919. He married Helen Juliet Rachel "Minora" Fox, an anthropologist he met in Cambridge during their studies, and they had four children. In 1919, he moved to Vienna for four years, where he worked on his PhD in philosophy, while continuing his analysis with Sigmund Freud. He later described his thesis "Contribution to the theory of reality" as psychoanalysis disguised as philosophy.

While visiting Germany prior to Adolf Hitler's appointment as chancellor, Money-Kyrle attended multiple campaign rallies and became intrigued by how political speech used by such authoritarian movements morphs into manipulation and propaganda where political illusions (Freudian sense) replace rational policy solutions.[3] He wrote:

The speeches were not particularly impressive. But the crowd was unforgettable. The people seemed gradually to lose their individuality and to become fused into a not very intelligent but immensely powerful monster [that was] under the complete control of the figure on the rostrum [who] evoked or changed its passions as easily as if they had been notes of some gigantic organ.

The three notes described in his article "The Psychology of Propaganda" is a progression that was repeated at each rally. "Each listener felt a part of its [the movement's] omnipotence within himself. He was transported into a new psychosis. The induced melancholia passed into paranoia, and the paranoia into megalomania."[4]

For ten minutes we heard of the sufferings of Germany . . . since the war. The monster seemed to indulge in an orgy of self-pity. Then for the next ten minutes came the most terrific fulminations against Jews and Social-democrats as the sole authors of these sufferings. Self-pity gave place to hate; and the monster seemed on the point of becoming homicidal. But the note was changed once more; and this time we heard for ten minutes about the growth of the Nazi party, and how from small beginnings it had now become an overpowering force. The monster became self-conscious of its size, and intoxicated by the belief in its own omnipotence. . . . Hitler ended . . . on a passionate appeal for all Germans to unite.[5]

Returning to England he attended University College London and pursued his second PhD - in anthropology - under the direction of John Carl Flügel. His thesis entitled "The Meaning of Sacrifice", was presented and defended in 1929. On the basis of this first psychoanalytic work he was elected a fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute. In 1936, he entered analysis with Melanie Klein.

During the Second World War, he worked for the Air Ministry which sent him after the war to Germany to help identify suitable individuals to govern Germany, working with John Rickman, at the German Personnel Research Branch, in Berlin. Upon his return to London, he carried on activities as a psychoanalyst and essayist, contributing to the Kleinian theoretical development and to the cultural and social application of phenomena generally linked to philosophy and sociology.

• 1929 The Meaning of Sacrifice
• Money-Kyrle, Roger (2015) [1941]. Meltzer, Donald; O’Shaughnessy, Edna (eds.). The Collected Papers of Roger Money-Kyrle. Harris Meltzer Trust/Karnac Books. ISBN 9781782202929.
  • 1941 “The Psychology of Propaganda”
  • 1968 “Cognitive Development”
  • 1971 “The Aim of Psychoanalysis”
• 1951 Psychoanalysis and Politics: a Contribution to the Psychology of Politics and Morals, Duckworth, 1951.
• 1961 Man's Picture of His World: A Psycho-analytic Study. International Universities Press, 1961