ABSTRACT
The notion of normopathy was introduced by Joyce McDougall in an article of 1972, taken up again in the last chapter of her book, Plea for a Measure of Abnormality originally published at a time when questions of madness, mental illness and norms were boiling joyfully in the cauldron of thought, whether analytic or not. Eichmann could be seen as a clinical case of normopathy in a society where the norm is inverted and where the commandments say “Thou shalt kill”, “Thou shalt steal”, “Thou shalt not feel any compassion” and, finally, “Thou shalt not think”; he could be seen as embodying the experience of being subjected to the terror of being rejected into outer darkness and of being excluded from the “group”. Psychoanalysis, which in principle encourages listening to one's own unconscious, could thus help to find paths of elaboration and resolution for conflicts other than the negation of oneself and otherness.
