You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
These essays extend over the whole of Roger Money-Kyrle's working life. They reflect in a most telling manner the development of his outlook from philosopher to psychoanalyst philosopher. Having gone to Vienna as a young man to absorb the logical positivism of Carnap and the Vienna Circle, he became attached more to the Vienna of Freud. Analysed briefly by Freud, then more fully by Ernest Jones, and then finally by Melanie Klein, his is the story of one of the main threads in the development of psychoanalysis over the past fifty years. His more recent writings have been strongly influenced by the work of Bion.
He summarizes the growth of his own thought in his paper 'Cognitive Development', published in 1968, in which he states: 'In the first stage, forty or fifty years ago, my dominant assumption would have been that mental illness is the result of sexual inhibitions … In the second stage, twenty to twenty-five years ago, [it] would have been that mental illness is the result of unconscious moral conflict … In the third and recent stage [it] is that the patient, whether clinically ill or not, suffers from unconscious misconceptions and delusions'.
The wide range of Money-Kyrle's interests is reflected in the subject matter of this collection of his papers. They cover such varied topics as war and its causes and development, prejudice and propaganda, the nature of social conflict, group formation, norms, and crime. Then there are numbers of papers on philosophy, on ethics and morals, on psychoanalytical inference, on beliefs and representations, and on the aims of psychoanalysis. These more sociological and philosophical writings are interspersed with many clinical and theoretical papers on such diverse topics as countertransference, the death instinct, migraine, megalomania, cognitive development, and the fear of insanity.
One of the central themes in these writings, a theme that appears and reappears, is that of the nature and the aims of psychoanalysis. T