Roger Money-Kyrle's Aspasia: The Future of Amorality (1932)

Abstract

This paper describes Roger Money-Kyrle's contribution to the To-day and To-morrow series, Aspasia: the Future of Amorality. Although many contributions to the series mentioned psychoanalysis in passing, Money-Kyrle's alone attempted to describe the difference Freud's science might make to the future of human society. Money-Kyrle's overlapping connections with the Moral Sciences ambience of Cambridge in the early 1920s, British psychoanalytic anthropology and the eugenicist movement associated with UCL and the Galton Institute are presented as a prelude to the discussion of his book. Aspasia emerges as an ambitious attempt to fuse these three elements of British scientific culture in the postwar period. If, in the final analysis, it doesn't quite succeed, it is still of interest as a record of Money-Kyrle's own intellectual commitments and for what it tells us about the wider British psychoanalytic scene in the early 1930s.