The most notorious of these is trance and catalepsy.
Even a very mild mystic is aberrant in our culture. But most peoples have regarded even extreme psychic manifestations not only as normal and desirable, but even as characteristic of highly val- ued and gifted individuals. This was true even in our own cultural background in that period when Catholi- cism made the ecstatic experience the mark of saint- hood. It is hard for us, born and brought up in a culture that makes no use of the experience, to realize how important a rôle it may play and how many indi- viduals are capable of it, once it has been given an honorable place in any society.
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Cataleptic and trance phenomena are, of course, only one illustration of the fact that those whom we regard as abnormals may function adequately in other cultures. Many of our culturally discarded traits are selected for elaboration in different societies. Homosexuality is an excellent example, for in this case our attention is not constantly diverted, as in the consideration of trance, to the interruption of routine activity which it implies. Homosexuality poses the problem very simply. A tendency toward this trait in our culture exposes an individual to all the conflicts
to which all aberrants are always exposed, and we tend to identify the consequences of this conflict with homosexuality. But these consequences are obviously local and cultural. Homosexuals in many societies are not incompetent, but they may be such if the culture asks adjustments of them that would strain any man’s vitality. Wherever homosexuality has been given an honorable place in any society, those to whom it is congenial have filled adequately the honorable rôles society assigns to them. Plato’s Republic is, of course, the most convincing statement of such a reading of homosexuality. It is presented as one of the major means to the good life, and it was generally so regarded in Greece at that time.
The cultural attitude toward homosexuals has not always been on such a high ethical plane, but it has been varied. Among many American Indian tribes there exists the institution of the berdache, as the French called them. These men-women were men who at puberty or thereafter took the dress and the occupations of women. Sometimes they married other men and lived with them. Sometimes they were men with no inversion, persons of weak sexual endowment who chose this rôle to avoid the jeers of the women. The berdaches were never regarded as of first-rate supernatural power, as similar men-women were in Siberia, but rather as leaders in women’s occupations, good healers in certain diseases, or, among certain tribes, as the genial organizers of social affairs. In any case, they were socially placed. They were not left exposed to the conflicts that visit the deviant who is excluded from participation in the recognized patterns of his society.
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No one civilization can possibly utilize in its mores the whole potential range of human behavior. Just as there are great numbers of possible phonetic articulations, and the possibility of language depends on a selection and standardization of a few of these in order that speech communication may be possible at all, so the possibility of organized behavior of every sort, from the fashions of local dress and houses to the dicta of a people’s ethics and religion, depends upon a similar selection among the possible behavior
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traits. In the field of recognized economic obligations or sex tabus this selection is as nonrational and sub- conscious a process as it is in the field of phonetics. It is a process which goes on in the group for long peri- ods of time and is historically conditioned by innu- merable accidents of isolation or of contact of peoples. In any comprehensive study of psychology, the selec- tion that different cultures have made in the course of history within the great circumference of potential behavior is of great significance.
Every society, beginning with some slight inclina- tion in one direction or another, carries its preference farther and farther, integrating itself more and more completely upon its chosen basis, and discarding those types of behavior that are uncongenial. Most of these organizations of personality that seem to us most incontrovertibly abnormal have been used by different civilizations in the very foundations of their institutional life. Conversely the most valued traits of our normal individuals have been looked on in dif- ferently organized cultures as aberrant. Normality, in short, within a very wide range, is culturally defined. It is primarily a term for the socially elaborated seg- ment of human behavior in any culture; and abnor- mality, a term for the segment that that particular civilization does not use. The very eyes with which we see the problem are conditioned by the long tra- ditional habits of our own society.
It is a point that has been made more often in rela- tion to ethics than in relation to psychiatry. We do not any longer make the mistake of deriving the morality of our own locality and decade directly from the inevitable constitution of human nature. We do not elevate it to the dignity of a first principle. We recog- nize that morality differs in every society, and is a con- venient term for socially approved habits. Mankind has always preferred to say, “It is a morally good,” rather than “It is habitual,” and the fact of this prefer- ence is matter enough for a critical science of ethics. But historically the two phrases are synonymous.