Abnormal Psychology

During the first half of previous century the main organic direction of American psychiatry with its dependence upon fairly simple, a bit immature physiological and behavioral referents was constructive to the growth of an experimentally leaning abnormal psychology. With the following recognition of psychoanalysis and the attendant dominance of the active, practical approach, though, the attention to experimentation was outshined by a propensity to replace a method, mainly rational, which put its stress upon the explanation of often imprecise and unrestrained medical observations.

Literature on psychology typically prefaces the text with an explanation for the complexity of defining psychology. A typical handbook of abnormal psychology have to start with a triple explanation, because besides the evident complexity of defining the main issue it is not at all simple to classify the notion of "abnormality," and even the nuances of the word "handbook" are far from understandable. We shall not try to provide any new meaning to the concept "psychology," but shall take it to indicate the methodical study of the behavior of organisms. We don’t have to be troubled overmuch about the common label of the textbook. However, we should dedicate more time to a debate about the sense of "abnormal," if only because our application of the word will be found to be different from that often established in psychiatry and clinical psychology.

As has recurrently been pointed out, the term "abnormal" is employed in at least two rather different senses. It may be associated with the statistically odd, or it may be associated with deviations from the idyllic norm. Often the two senses are mingled, in order that deviations from the norm which are definitely atypical are called "abnormal" just when they are in an adverse direction. Therefore, an IQ of 50 is regarded as abnormal, but not one of 150; spinelessness, but not courageousness; psychosis, but not superior adjustment.

There is frequently emphasis on incorporation through theory, an effort to see abnormal psychology as a part of broad, investigational psychology. The rules of learning theory, to present but one example, are relevant no less to neurotics than to rats and university students; should it not be the duty of the psychologist to infer the particulars of abnormal behavior from such broad rules? This approach has directed the vision on the difficulty of treatment also, and on the connection between abnormal psychology and psychiatry.

The word "abnormal" entails a law of categorization; we cannot search for reasons of "abnormality" unless we had some idea of what we denote by "normal," and what types of deviations we would concur to regard as "abnormal." Having once received a coarse and complete response to this problem, we would be able to discover that our group of "abnormal" personalities was still too varied to make the conception of a single common reason a rational one, and we would have to follow our attempts at categorization by distinguishing such subgroups in our society as mental defectives, neurotics, psychotics, and so forth.

Conventionally, categorization in the sphere of abnormal psychology has been done by means of exact diseases or sets of symptoms; we address schizophrenia, hysteria, or manic-depressive psychosis in almost the same way as we address cancer, tuberculosis, or neurosyphilis. This is possibly owing to the medical habit in this sphere; psychiatry has always put more stress on the thought traditions of broad medicine than to the details and techniques of contemporary psychology. Thus, the best thing is to investigate the underlying principle of modern diagnostic systems, and to examine also the issue of whether enhanced methods may not now be accessible for the resolution of this fundamental problem.

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