ABSTRACT
In order to support the contention about abnormal psychology, it is first of all necessary to describe the place of scientific inquiry in the study of normal behavior. Some of the reluctance to enroll psychology among the other sciences seems to be due, in part, to a misunderstanding of the nature of its actual content. The difference between misconception of the nature of psychology, trivial though it may seem at first sight, is crucial to an appreciation of how abnormal behavior can be made the subject of scientific inquiry. A more realistic description might be given only by a multidimensional, nonlinear scheme, which would show, quite rightly, that the relations between psychology and the other disciplines are complex and complicated. Even the simple horizontal view, however, is certainly not as misleading as the vertical conception of the relation of psychology to the other sciences.
