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With the development of psychological medicine the old organic standards of normality went by the board. The psycho-analyst, in particular, as a result of his investigation of anomalous, incapacitated cases without even well-defined psychological 'symptoms', found it was no longer possible to exclude a capacity for personal happiness and peace of mind from the professional categories of normality. 'A normal individual is anyone who is free from symptoms, unhampered by mental conflict, who shows satisfactory working capacity, and who is able to love someone apart from himself.' The flaw in this tentative definition is that it does not follow that anyone who does not come to consultation is sufficiently well adapted to be called normal. Systematic examination of the clinical, structural and economic aspects of normality, and of adaptation factors and anxiety, leads to the following generalizations. Normality can be subdivided into a number of reaction systems, each appropriate to a particular phase of instinct mastery. These systems are in the first place (infancy) psychotic, later neurotic and in adult life characterological. They represent ramparts created under the stimulus of anxiety. The most obvious normal rampart is adult character, a series of reactions promoting mainly by means of displacement a stable equilibrium between instinctual demands and gratification in reality. A broader view is that normality implies simultaneous yet harmonious function of a number of mechanisms (of which repression is the most incalculable) (a) for controlling instinct, and (b) for securing direct (or substitute) gratification, with the ego acting as a compensating balance. Normality may be described as a harmonious confluence of the reality principle with the primitive pleasure principle; it is possibly an overlapping of psychotic and objective reality testing. An alternative view is that normally the anxiety precautions evoked by reality are sufficient to cope with co