Roger Money-Kyrle

Roger Money-Kyrle was a British psychoanalyst renowned for his wide-ranging intellect interested in the ways an individual psyche relates to the wider sphere of human society. A member of the British Psycho-Analytical Society, Money-Kyrle blended the British empirical tradition and a neopositivistic approach to philosophy of the Viennese school of Moritz Schlick in areas of social sciences research which would later be referred to as social psychology. Career Money-Kyrle was born in Hertfordshire in 1898. He was the fourth child and only son surviving childhood 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. 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.