abnormal

adj. 1. (psychiatry) the psychiatrist’s catchall for individuals or behaviors or things in general that scare him.

How come the psychiatrist is so obsessed with making everyone normal?

Actually in this obsession the shrink is our proxy. Humans have a natural aversion to people who are different. It is almost as though we all sense that something would break, something would fall apart, if someone were allowed to defy the agreements that we all share. Thus everyone, to some extent, enforcesa a whole series of agreements on other menbers of the race.

Psychiatrists are simply the ultimate embodiment of this. More than the policeman, who merely enforces physical agreement, the psychiatrist seeks to enforce mental agreement.

At first glance, the psychiatrist's methods may seem a bit extreme, but viewed in the context of his role as reality cop, his methods begin to make sense. How do you enforce thought agreement? Why, naturally, with duress, imprisonment, threats, torture, and ultimately with mental or physical murder. The psychiatrist's brutal, no-holds-barred assault on abnormality can go a long way toward preventing people from entertaining any further notions of violating their fundamental agreements with the rest of us.

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