The Normopath Next Door: The Psychopathology Of Normality
“Alas for those that never sing,
But die with all their music in them!”
The Voiceless
By Oliver Wendell Holmes, 1858
Contemporary society produces a specific type of subjectivity: Normopathy. A normopath is someone who is hyper adapted to external reality and not aware nor invested in the internal world, in dreams, or in fantasies. “I don’t dream”, says the normopath. The normopath mimics their environment and dominant ideologies like an automaton, living according to pre-made social rules and adheres to strict social conventions. The normopath lives a life of productivity, performance, and efficiency. The orthos (direct, straight, stiff, correct) of hyperadaptation is privileged over the pathos (suffering, pain, passion) of subjectivity. The normopath is not affected by the beauty and terrors of world, doesn’t suffer pain nor joy. For the normopath, the body is not the fountain of sensuality, of the drives which demands us to find satisfactions, but an object among a sea of objects, a machine that needs to be optimized through strict physical exercise and diet. The normopath relates to others as mirrors, always seeking others who think alike and will not threaten their sense of security and sameness.
The normopath lives at the periphery of being, in a state of exile from one’s own subjective desire. Personal and emotional experiences are avoided and replaced with a rigid adherence to duty, norms, rules, and protocols. The normopath is over invested in material objects, in job titles, in labels, in the surface of appearances and images. The normopath believes that life is simple and straightforward. “Why do you always make things so complicated?”, asks the normopath. The normopath has a poor vocabulary and utters ready-made sentences that are general, empty, and lack subjectivity or any type of personal implication: “That is so exciting”, “I love that”, “Brutal!”, “You did it!”. The normopath does not like poetry, and does not wander in day-dreaming or reverie. The normopath abhors surrealism but adores realism. The normopath has a phobia of any situation or relationship that could bring any sense of personal involvement to life. The normopath killed Dionysus and is devoted to Apollo. The normopath lives a comfortable, safe, and conventional life and does not take risks.
“The normopath lives at the periphery of being, in a state of exile from one’s own subjective desire. The normopath is not affected by the beauty and terrors of world, does not suffer pain nor joy. The normopath lives a comfortable, safe, and conventional life and does not take risks.”
If the normopath doesn’t have otherness inside, where is the unconscious? And is normopathy a defense? What the normopath mostly fears is mental disintegration, falling into severe somatic disorganization, or even psychosis. By limiting personal involvement and emotions, the normopath is attempting to control and avoid psychotic decompensation. Therefore, the normopath lives in a state of silent depression and quiet despair, as a way of containing and keeping away serious disorganization. However, the normopath believes that everything is well in life and rarely complains. After all, for the normopath it is better not to be than to be mad. The normopath rarely seeks analysis, preferring cures without subjective implication such as psychiatric medication, dietary supplements, or skills based, structured, and manualized psychotherapies. The normopath does not like philosophy however loves stoicism and radical acceptance. “Things are as they are, just accept it, there is no point in challenging things”, is the normopath’s song for quiet adaptation.
In the unlikely event of a normopath ending up in analysis, the normopath fills up the session with everyday events, factually described in detail without any affect nor relevance for one’s narrative. The normopath does not mention any dreams and does not free associate. If there are dreams, these are felt by the analyst as empty and intellectualized. The transference, condition sine qua non for psychoanalysis, is not developed, at least in its classical sense. The normopath resists the exploration of the past, as a way of avoiding the encounter with any possible significant traumatic events. In the countertransference the analyst will feel sleepiness, dissociation, but also anger by wishing to shake the petrified dull world of the normopath. Usually, analysts have none or little pleasure in analyzing the normopath due to the poverty of representations and the resistance towards subjective exploration. If the normopath stays in treatment, the goal is put the normopath in contact with despair and anguish, the fundamental aspects for the beginning of an analysis. The analyst could share reveries and emotional reactions, as a way of providing a bridge between the concrete world and the internal world.
“What the normopath mostly fears is mental disintegration, falling into severe somatic disorganization, or even psychosis. The normopath rarely seeks analysis. Analysts have none or little pleasure in analyzing the normopath due to the poverty of representations and the resistance towards subjective exploration.”
Jacques Lacan wrote that “Not only can man’s being not be understood without madness, but it would not be man’s being if it did not bear madness within itself as the limit of this freedom”. We can only be as free as much as we can tolerate our own madness. Perhaps the normopath is the tragedy figure of the end of times. Or perhaps psychoanalysts are the tragic ones, guilty of imagining, or even demanding, that everyone should have a rich internal world and live a creative and poetic life. Perhaps psychoanalysts are the obsolete priests and priestesses of the unconscious, an old mythology from the times of metaphysics when the world was still enchanted. Perhaps the age of the machine and technique does not need the unconscious. As Albert Camus imagined Sisyphus happy, we too must imagine the normopath happy. And happiness is what we are told that we want.
“Perhaps psychoanalysts are the obsolete priests and priestesses of the unconscious, an old mythology from the times of metaphysics when the world was still enchanted. Perhaps the age of the machine and technique does not need the unconscious. We must imagine the normopath happy.”
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