The Dilemma of Abnormality
by Steven James Bartlett
published in
Abnormal Psychology across the Ages, Thomas G. Plante (ed.)
Volume 3, Chapter 1, pp. 1-20
Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2013
A study of abnormal psychology throughout history would be incomplete without a discussion of the work of clinicians who have questioned the use of psychological normality as a diagnostic baseline to judge whether individuals and groups are mentally ill. At the core of psychiatry and much clinical psychology is the assumption that psychological normality should serve as a diagnostic standard in determining whether individuals are abnormal and judged mentally ill.
This chapter has several parts: Part I reviews evaluations of psychological normality by researchers who question its use as a standard of mental health. The intent is (1) to direct attention to a group of harmful predispositions that typify psychologically normal people but which cannot be associated with good mental health, and (2) to recognize, as a result, that the use of psychological normality as a standard of good mental health, and deviation from normality as an indication of mental dysfunction, both possess very significant shortcomings.
In Part II, I discuss the comparative rarity of good mental health, its relation to psychological abnormality, and the predictive function of both.
In Part III, the discussion focuses on a serious dilemma at the heart of abnormal psychology: On the one hand, the diagnostic standard of psychological normality gives us cause to distrust its clinical desirability; on the other, situating good mental health at some distance from psychological normality as Maslow and others have done results in a cloudy picture in which assessing an individual’s level of mental health is difficult and uncertain. I refer to this as the diagnostic dilemma of abnormality because it leads to the recognition that psychological abnormality when employed as a diagnostic criterion is sometimes no more indicative of mental illness than of mental health. We confront the difficulty of differentiating psychological pathology and mental health as long as we adhere to the standard of normality.
In Part IV, to resolve this dilemma I refer to three promising therapeutic alternatives in terms of which psychological pathology and good mental health can be effectively understood.
For more information about the three-volume collection, Abnormal Psychology across the Ages, or to order, click here.
ERRATUM IN "The Dilemma of Abnormality"
As is too often the case when mathematical expressions are employed, the publisher's typesetter turned an equation that appears on page 11 into gibberish. The relevant text and the corrected equation should read as follows:
We may think of a large human group as possessing a higher order “personality,” a construct formed by the statistical average of the predispositions of the individuals forming the group. Cattell called this construct “syntality”: It is “[t]hat which determines a group’s performance when its situation is given—[a]nalogous to personality in the individual....” (Cattell, R.B. (1971). Abilities: Their structure, growth, and action. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, p. 520)
If we attempt to account for some of the main factors that affect the predictable outcome of a group’s behavior, emotional response, and pattern of thinking, we might formulate this in somewhat oversimplified form as
Unpacked into English, this group prediction equation means: The probability that group G will exhibit behavior b, affective response a, and thought pattern t is a function of the sum of the probabilities of the individual members i (1 to n) of G to behave, feel, and think in certain ways (a) given the set consisting of a particular situation S, interpretations I of S made by members of G, and the consensus interpretation made of the situation S by G itself, and (b) given the set of the interpretations of the group’s behavior, affective response, and thought pattern by the individuals forming G, and the interpretation by G of the group’s own behaviors, affective responses, and thought patterns.
The purpose of this equation is to give a partial idea of the complexity of predicting a group’s response to a given situation while taking into account the interpretations that individuals and the group as a whole make both of the situation and of the group’s reactions to it. This kind of dynamic, feed-forward, and feed-back system involves psychologically-based loops that form the dynamic of group behavior. |
