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NEITHER PATHOLOGY NOR NORMALITY LENDS ITSELF TO A CLEAR definition, and I will not try to give one. Some would even question whether Freud, when he occupied himself with the study of neurosis, was dealing with pathology. They might say that he treated as individual pathology what in reality was an outcome of social circumstances. Freud (1930) himself viewed neurosis as the price we pay for civilization. It is a pity that the social changes of our time have changed this price more and more into the ubiquity of severe character disturbances. Freud sought and found general principles for the normal and the pathological processes of the mind. In this paper I want to focus on the area where pathological functioning gave us insight into the normal, directed the observations of normality, or gave us views about prevention, however narrow its scope may be.
When Freud made his great discoveries, he soon realized that they concerned a far wider field than the understanding of neurosis he was looking for. In a period of doubt (1897) when he asked himself whether his insight into neurosis was correct, he did not doubt his psychology of unconscious psychic processes and of the dream. The pathology of hysteria was at that moment unclear to him. Until then he had attributed the etiology of hysteria to early trauma, to seduction by the father. Now he