{{U}}Every society, beginning with some slight inclination 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.{{/U}} (1) Most of those organizations of personality that seem to us most uncontrovertibly abnormal have been used by different civilizations in the very foundations of their institutional life. Conversely the most valued traits of normal individuals have been looked on in differently organized cultures as aberrant. Normality, in short, within a very wide range, is culturally defined. {{U}}It is primarily a term for the socially elaborated segment of human behavior in any culture, and abnormality is a term for the segment that particular civilization does not use.{{/U}} (2) The very eyes with which we see the problem are conditioned by the long traditional habits of our own society.
It is a point that has been made more often in relation to ethics than in relation to psychiatry. We do not any longer make the mistake of deriving the morality of our locality and decade directly from the inevitable constitution of human nature. We do not elevate it to the dignity of a first principle. We recognize that morality differs in every society, and is a convenient term for socially approved habits. Mankind has always preferred to say, "it is morally good," rather than, "it is habitual," and the fact of this preference is matter enough for a critical science of ethics. But historically the two phrases are synonymous.
The concept of the normal is properly a variant of the concept of the good. It is that which society has approved. A normal action is one which falls well within the limits of expected behavior for a particular society. {{U}}Its variability among different peoples is essentially a function of the variability of the behavior patterns that different societies have created for themselves, and can never be wholly divorced from a consideration of culturally institutionalized types of behavior.{{/U}}(3)
Each culture is a more or less elaborate working out of the potentialities of the segment it has chosen. {{U}}In so far as a civilization is well integrated and consistent within itself, it will tend to carry farther and farther, according to its nature, its initial impulse toward a particular type of action, and from the point of view of any other culture those elaborations may include more and more extreme and aberrant traits.{{/U}} (4)
Each of these traits, in proportion as it reinforces the chosen behavior patterns of that culture, is for that culture, normal. Those individuals to whom it is congenial either congenitally, or as the result of childhood sets, are accorded prestige in that culture, and are not visited with the social contempt or disapproval which their traits would call down upon them in a society that was differently organized. {{U}}On the other hand, those individuals whose characteristics are not congenial to the selected type of human behavior in that community are considered the deviants, no matter how valued their personality traits may be in a different civilization.{{/U}} (5)