Psychopathological Factors

We are all convinced that we are perfectly normal. Crazy people are, too.

An astonishment, however, can arise when you learn at school that a certain dose of paranoia and schizophrenia is omnipresent. Psychoanalysis itself considers that normal psychism is available on three axes: neurosis, paranoia and perversion. Adage is well known: the normal is crazy, and the crazy is normal…

It is difficult, within a society whose benchmarks are established by tradition, to determine whether the behaviour considered normal is really normal, i.e. in line with the genetic potential of human beings. The natives accustomed to the ritual of the " plateau niggers" consider the distorted face as a cannon of beauty. Tribes whose women lengthen their necks by stacking rings have other normality criteria. Cultural relativism is a reality in the sense that members of a society who obey certain norms feel these standards as perfectly natural, even if they are clearly unnatural.

Things are even more complex when it comes to assessing the normality of a psychic predisposition. If, for example, the majority of a population shows a paranoid trend, as a result of generalized educational methods, the culture that will build around this behavioral drift will eventually integrate paranoia as a normal characteristic. We will talk about self-esteem as a quality, even if it is the symptom of a defective structure of the self. It would seem normal to demand that the loved one never feel for a third party; or to kill one another for an insult on the pretext of honor; or to massacre unbelievers in the name of a God of Love…

The subjection to norms does not in any way prevent unconscious recognition of fault in the face of the natural laws of these behaviors, nor the internal and social conflicts inevitably caused by resentment towards tradition and previous generations.

In any case, if we want to solve the substance of the problem, it is essential to question the psychic mode of functioning that our culture assumes to be normal. For the simple reason that it regularly leads to conflicts, crises, wars and, nowadays, the systematic destruction of the planet.

It is important to know that certain abnormalities of psychic functioning can be transmitted from generation to generation by education or by the influence of the environment, and appear normal because of their consistency and omnipresence. For example endemic neurosis, of which it is known to be a consequence of repressive morality, and of which few are truly conscious persons.

In fact, it is the standardity standard in its entirety that it is the responsibility of human ecogenetics to reconstruct: how would psychism function outside of the pathogenic factors of culture? None of the means available to science should be neglected for such an approach: biology, de-la-genetique, psychology, anthropology, ethology, ecology, parapsychology, etc., plus a good dose of intuition…