ABSTRACT
No matter how normal a person may be, he has been taught, from earliest childhood, to evaluate his own behaviour by the measuring stick of convention. What his father did before him, and what his neighbours are now doing around him, constitute the standard of normalcy. And this ridiculous method of evaluation is, to a considerable extent, sanctioned by the so-called “social scientists” of to-day—evidently because psychology, so far, has failed to furnish any tangible description of a normal human being, save a statistical one. A bold psychiatrist, not so long ago, frankly stated that if a young girl attended a school where a majority of the other girls smoked and drank, she would be eligible for psychiatric examination if she refused also to smoke and drink. I take it that the eminent doctor who made this assertion did not mean to suggest smoking and drinking as a test of social submission to girl friends, but rather as an emphatic laying down of the rule that average behaviour of a given group constitutes a proper standard by which the normalcy of any member of the group may be scientifically measured. No principle for study and improvement of the individual could be more pernicious than this.
