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1How do our moral and political preferences change with increasing psychological insight? Do the preferences of different people remain divergent? Do they tend to converge or do they converge in some respects and remain
divergent in others? If so, what is the type of morality or ideology toward which they converge? Money-Kyrle argues that these originally philosophical questions are now scientific questions to be answered by empirical psychology.
2The author discusses the effect of self-knowledge on beliefs, morals or truths held by people who achieve awareness of their own unconscious processes by psychoanalysis. His romantic conclusion is: 'Thus analysis is a rational process which operates solely by exposing error and replacing it by truth'.
3There exist two types of conscience derived from the two infantile positions, paranoid and depressive. Freud makes the superego morality predominantly a morality of fear. Klein takes into account in addition the more positive aspect of superego development, namely, that morality which is based on love, not fear. The depressive and persecutory elements are from the outset inseparably combined in proportions that determine the type of conscience, the kind of situation that arouses it, and the nature of the action it impels. Deep analysis diminishes the persecutory element of the superego, and should ideally produce a person who fears only real dangers. The depressive element cannot be reduced by deep analysis in the same way by exposing its unreality, since the wish to destroy is a fact which cannot be disproved. The destructive impulses that cause depressive guilt are weakened indirectly through a reduction of the persecutory anxiety; nevertheless, analysis 'increases rather than diminishes the capacity to feel guilt of a depressive kind whenever a "good" object is in any way injured or betrayed'.
4'We have now discovered that there is a causal link between the possession of a certain kind of conscience and the pos