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Chair: Clara Nemas de Urman
Presenters: Heinz Weiss, Susan Finkelstein, Francis Grier
The panel explored causes and understanding of war by focusing on Roger Money-Kyrle’s historical writings foreboding World War II and the fear of encirclement (H. Weiss); being swallowed, buried alive, encased within the object, persecuted, and annihilated (S. Finkelstein); and the creative, reparative use of music by two wartime composers (F. Grier).
In his paper, “The ‘Bolero’ of Propaganda and War: The relevance of Roger Money-Kyrle’s Contributions from the 1930s for Understanding the Current War of Russia against Ukraine,” Heinz Weiss drew a parallel between the precursors of World War II as formulated by the philosopher/psychoanalyst Roger Money-Kyrle (1988–1980) and the Russian war against the Ukraine. The first phase of Money-Kyrle’s theory on the origin and psychological causes of war, written between the two World Wars, describes how group processes can assemble, split off, project and rearrange a sense of outside “threat.” “National paranoia,” coupled with a claustrophobic fear of encirclement and defence against it, leads to war. Omnipotent elation, characteristic of the manic defence, can be seen in the euphoria of war fever. Normal inhibition by social norms and the individual’s conscience are transformed and distorted by group regression and lead to perversion of the superego. Under such conditions, restitutive functions of normal superego functioning, which would normally prevent the outbreak of war, break down. Mr Weiss noted that Money-Kryle’s “restitution” to normal superego functioning as described in his “Voices of Joan of Arc” (1933) is later called “reparation” by Melanie Klein (1937, 1958). Analysing a propaganda event with Hitler and Goebbels in 1932, Money-Kyrle observed how an undercurrent of primitive, emotional messages can be communicated from a leader to a group through projective identification, becoming a monster without thought, creating a “bolero” of