16. The Anthropological and the Psychoanalytic Concept of the Norm*

Any major new idea in one branch of science is nearly always fertile in many other branches too. But just because it is so potent, it seldom escapes the fate of being occasionally fertile in fields where it is not appropriate. So, for example, the nineteenth-century idea of evolution contributed in no small measure to the crude philosophy of twentieth-century militarism - a bastard Titan, by Darwin out of Hegel, which perhaps both parents would have indignantly repudiated.

One of the major new ideas of the twentieth century is that of relativity in physics. It has certainly been fertile in other fields in which perhaps it too has sometimes been applied without enough discrimination.

The application to be considered here is that which has led to a theory of social, and in particular ethical, relativity (Westermarck, 1932). Often the opposite and older view, which assumed the existence of some absolute standard or norm of attitude or behaviour, is now felt to be not only false but illogical. For, just as it was once assumed that an absolute, or unique frame of reference not only did, but must, exist in physics, so now it is often assumed that such a frame not only does not, but cannot, exist in either physics or sociology.

But so far as this conclusion is based on the analogy of physics, it is important to remember that Einstein's theory of relativity was first developed to explain the results of a negative experiment. If Michaelson and Morley had found, as they expected, that there was a difference between the velocity of light moving in one direction and that of light moving in another, they would have had evidence of the unique frame of reference which had always been assumed. Thus there was