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The problem was not that he was a patient—it was that he was just too short. Yet the little man in a bathrobe, standing, waiting in front of the nursing station in corridor A-3 of Billings Hospital had Heinz Kohut's face, a face I knew well from the dust jacket of The Analysis of the Self. It seemed impossible that this diminutive person could be the master psychoanalyst, the author of brilliant insights, whose theoretical fluency and compassionate understanding pervaded the book I was carefully studying.
Revolutions in science, large and small, occur not in the pages of research journals, nor on the platforms of scientific conferences. They pervade the lives of scientists, affecting everything from our most abstract thoughts to our self-regard and feelings toward others. The psychology of scientists at the forefront of scientific revolutions has been dramatically described. Most scientists, however, engage in “normal science,” the elaboration and exploration of the paradigms whose initial formulation constitutes a scientific revolution.
Like psychological normalcy, the relatively smoothly functioning processes of “normal” scientific work call themselves to our attention less urgently than the atypical events of revolution. The working scientist has integrated so much into his pursuit, so inconspicuously, that