Normopathy

The notion of normopathy was introduced by Joyce McDougall in an article of 1972, taken up again in the last chapter (bearing the same title) of her book, Plea for a Measure of Abnormality (McDougall, 1992 [1978]), originally published at a time when questions of madness, mental illness and norms were boiling joyfully in the cauldron of thought, whether analytic or not. Our conception of normality has since changed, so that this text probably seems more subversive today than it did at the time.

The question of whether one is normal or not nonetheless lingers in many people's minds, even in our era when what once seemed transgressive now appears quite ordinary. Joyce McDougall traces this question back to castration anxiety which persists, even if it manifests itself differently depending on the state of mores. “It has simply found new disguises,” she says (1992 [1978], p. 478).

Of normality erected as an ideal, she says that it is a symptom, a defensive character formation against the fear of existing and of having to confront reality. In other words, asking oneself whether one is normal or not, trying to be normal at any price, irrespective of the norms, avoids having to ask oneself questions about one's own desires and fantasies, having to recognise “all that is most painful and scandalous in the depths of our being - not only the forbidden erotic desires but also our infantile avidity for what we do not possess, unsuspected selfishness, our childlike narcissism, and our murderous aggression” (p. 480). An analysis confronts us precisely with what is most alien and most intimate in ourselves. And, she adds, not only does analysis lead us to discover not only that “I is another” (Je est un autre) … “but worse, that the I may dissolve, making way for nameless anxiety. Why should anyone seek to possess this knowledge? Who wants to question all that he knows, all that he is?” she continues (p. 480).

We might be led to think here about Eichmann, whom Hannah Arendt describe