‘Men never do evil so fully and cheerfully as when they do so for conscience sake’, wrote Pascal. His observation anticipates Astor’s ‘scourge’ by almost three hundred years, written as it was in the century that saw the terrible bloodshed, in the name of religion, of the Thirty Years War. A colleague of Henry Dicks, the Kleinian analyst Roger Money Kyrle, put forward a theory, rooted both in his clinical practice and experience of work of the kind that Dicks had been engaged in, that there are two kinds of conscience: a persecutory conscience and a humanistic one. The persecutory conscience derives from splitting and projection and is characterised by our dividing the world into black and white, all good and all bad; our side is all good and human, and those who are not on our side are demonised and seen as not human. The supreme virtues are obedience and duty – obedience to externally imposed rules, laid down by a god ‘out there’ (cf. Spinoza), or by other authority figures such as the father. Guilt, ‘persecutory guilt’, is fear of punishment if we infringe those rules, but there is also a ‘get out clause’ because if we transgress we can always deny responsibility for our actions and plead that we were only obeying orders. By contrast, the humanistic conscience is based on identification and empathy; we are less inclined to divide the world into all good or all evil, we can imagine that there are shades of grey. We see even our enemies are human, and take responsibility for our actions. Guilt, humanistic guilt, is about harming other people, or remorse, and if we have harmed others there is a wish to atone, make reparation, make amends.
Money Kyrle argues that each of us has both kinds of conscience, that they form poles on either end of a continuum, and that we all move backward and forwards on that continuum, from moment to moment, throughout our lives according to the level of anxiety – anxiety about unemployment, for example, or the threat of humiliation, or of abandonment. Some start their adult life at the persecutory end of the continuum if early experience has been damaging, but In psychotherapy patients can be observed moving more towards the humanist pole. Money Kyrle needlessly complicates his argument by setting it with the framework of the death instinct and of logical positivism, but stripped of both it has valuable explanatory power, and similar observations have been made in other schools of psychotherapy, though their findings might be expressed in different language.
