With each passing day, I find myself confronted with increasingly valid reasons as to why psychology is a doomed enterprise. It is evidently quite paradoxical for a student of psychology to feel this way but what perplexes me even more is why such reasons generally do not foster thoughtful deliberation. One question that has recently occupied my mind pertains to the task of establishing normalcy within psychology.
It appears to me that, normalcy in the hard sciences is relatively simple to determine. For instance with the case of polydactyly which refers to the condition of having more than five fingers, it only takes mere comparison to understand why that particular condition is pathological. Since the majority of the population only have five fingers any deviations from that norm becomes abnormal. In line with simple observation, pathology seems to correspond to the degree to which a condition varies from the mean of the population.
However, this convention holds very little water in a psychological context because an individual, by definition, is a deviation from the norm. Consequently any study of individuals must adopt a different approach to establish normalcy within its discipline and this is where its inquiry becomes increasingly obscure. Psychological theories that I have hitherto studied implicitly come to define what is normal in an attempt to understand mind and behaviour. Freud's theories on psychosexual development even explicitly state that any arrest in the stages of development would occasion personalities that could be deemed as pathological. However I believe such theories still suffer from the dearth of a higher ideal which is often what provides clarity in any investigation.
In the study of medicine, it is fairly obvious that the mechanisms of the body operate collectively to ensure the survival of the organism. Although there might be a few instances where our physiology appears to work at cross purposes with that objective, it is still the general direction that it tends towards. However what is the purpose of the mind? Why does the psyche engage in its habitual activity of assimilation and understanding? It seems that psychological inquiry has only resorted to sidestepping the question of "normalcy" by merely looking at the mind in functional terms.
Although tenable, this line of investigation is bound to suffer from the limitation that there are an infinite ways to be as long as the individual is able to function. Such negative definitions only serve to disguise an alarming problem which now confronts psychological endeavours. That how can one define normal without taking recourse to pathology. If psychology ever wishes to escape the labyrinth of subjectivity, it must liberate itself from the perspective of illnesses and embark on the obscure endeavour of seeking the higher ideal which subordinates the psyche. The study of that ideal, I believe, is essential if we hope to free ourselves of the illusion that any manner of being that does not produce dysfunction is representative of normalcy.