KNOWLEDGE BUILDING

The Social Construction of Normality*

by Sophie Freud

Abstract
Our rapidly changing culture raises questions about standards of normality that social workers are often asked to help enforce. The
author insists that we need standards to guide our communal life while also reminding the reader that normality is a mere context-
dependent social construct. The article gives examples of drastically changing standards such as the changing expectations of normal sex-
uality or normal child rearing. Therapeutic standards, partially laid down in the Code of Ethics, are, moreover, the guidelines for social work
practice, given the close interface between ethical values and clinical practice. The ambiguity of the meaning of normal and abnormal is
discussed, suggesting that abnormal behavior may be required in the face of social injustices.

IN THIS ERA OF MOMENTOUS CHANGES in all areas
of living, the concept of normality is forever being newly
constructed and reconstructed. It behooves us to partici-
pate in this important process given that the activities of
our social work profession have always been focused
around moral and ethical values. It has thus become one
of our most urgent tasks to examine together the concept
of normality on which many of our professional activities
are implicitly based, and which is the guidelines for our
work. The concept of normality is also of interest because
it involves the ambiguity of linguistic meanings.
A Postmodern Stance
I have called this article “The Social Construction of
Normality” to emphasize the postmodern stance that in-
forms my thinking — namely that our social and to some
extent our physical reality is humanly constructed. Such
a stance implies that there are many possible realities
based on many possible truths (Rosen & Kuehlwein,
1996). I hope to elaborate that normality is a value-based
concept; that it heavily depends on the sociopolitical eco-
nomic context including the historical moment; that it is
culture specific; and that there is no normality outside a
particular context.
Changing Standards
The idea for the subject of this article was triggered
by a friend worrying that his twenty-year-old daughter
had still not had any sexual relations. He did not use the
word virgin, showing that female sexual relations have
become transformed from a loss — in this case loss of
virginity — to a gain — in this case gain of sexual expe-
rience. My mind flashed back to my college days at Har-
vard in ‘44, when a classmate was expelled because she
was seen entering a hotel room with her fiancé, a soldier
who was home on furlough and who would be returning
to the front after the weekend. It struck me how, within
the span of my own very short lifetime, our sexual mores
had undergone such drastic changes — and they contin-
ue to do so, with changing medical, political, and social
circumstances, although not necessarily in a linear fash-
ion. But sexuality is just one of many areas of runaway
change. When a critical mass of people change their be-
havior, the deviant may become the norm. I was deviant
when I worked as a young mother in the 1950s — now
the stay-at-home mother is being frowned upon, and in-
digent young mothers are being coerced to go to work.
I can think of four not mutually exclusive and per-
haps somewhat arbitrary areas that point to the interface
between standards of normality and the moral and ethi-
cal aspects of our social work activities referring more
specifically to clinical social work practice.
First, we decide as a society who is normal and what
should be done with people who deviate from society’s

* This article was first given as a talk, in modified form at the July 3, 1996 World Congress of Psychotherapy Conference in Vienna, Aus-
tria. It was then published, again in a modified form, in German as “Die Soziale Konstruktion der Normalitat” in Psychologie in Osterre-
ich, September 1996. It was then given as a talk for the Chicago Society of Clinical Social Workers on May 2, 1997, and again for Salem
State College School of Social Work on November 24, 1997.

Families in Society: The Journal of Contemporary Human Services

Copyright 1999 Families International, Inc.

333
FAMILIES IN SOCIETY • Volume 80, Number 4
expectations — counseling being only one of the more
benign choices. Who deserves counseling, who is in need
of it, or should be coerced into receiving it.
When a critical mass
of people change
their behavior, the deviant
may become the norm.
Second, we may ask, is it normal that counseling and
psychotherapy have become a major social institution,
the one which attends to people in pain, the one that re-
places religion for solace and replaces family or friends as
major confidants? There may also have been a historical
time when people in emotional pain simply kept it to
themselves. Such long ago people might have been great-
ly surprised at the thought that one would want to share
one’s pain with a professional paid for this purpose.
Third, psychotherapy’s and social work’s theory and
practice techniques and research methodology all have
value connotations. For example, it is now perfectly ob-
vious that psychoanalytic theory was originally, almost
absurdly, biased by a male perspective that saw women
as “other.” It became normal to view women as castrat-
ed males. Yet we had to await feminist consciousness
raising before the full impact of this perspective struck
us. With this change of perspective came the realization,
so well elaborated by Philip Cushman (1995), that all
theoretical constructions that define our reality have so-
ciopolitical implications. Not only theory, but practice
methodology as well, is value-sensitive. Is it, for example,
acceptable and therefore normal, to trick patients, such
as through the use of paradoxical techniques or by sub-
tle methods of persuasion — for their own good?
With our increasing self-consciousness regarding
the expression of values in all our activities, we have
also changed our approach to research, sometimes even
in fundamental ways. Many attempts are currently
made to transform the objects of our research into
collaborative participants.
Fourth — and I am still enumerating the interfaces
between normality, values, and social work practice —
values very much enter into what we call assessment.
Often we are expected to diagnose each kind of trouble
334
with a particular label, which, once again, has important
consequences in terms of who gets what services and who
will pay for them. Diagnostic labels have quadrupled
within the last twenty years, and the value dimension of
such labels is highlighted by the political debates that
have surrounded some diagnostic labels, such as homo-
sexuality and, more recently, borderline personality (Her-
man, l992), self-defeating personality, and others. Inci-
dentally, I do not agree with those of my colleagues who
disapprove of every kind of label, because I think some
labels have definite useful functions even apart from the
supposition that different treatments fit different diag-
noses. Some labels pathologize widespread human fail-
ings, yet paradoxically, they also normalize them. I have
several acquaintances who have suddenly “discovered”
after the media blitz about attention deficit disorder
(ADD) that they might have been suffering from ADD
perhaps all their lives, and the same is certainly true of
post-traumatic stress disorder. These new diagnoses have
clarified, or at least given meaning to, their personal ex-
periences and almost relieved them from feeling different
and strange. The fuzzy label of ADD, whether accurate-
ly applied or not, has lessened their isolation and allowed
them to join a whole community of people who have a
similar condition. It is possible that diagnostic labels are
not only stigmatizing, but also externalize certain prob-
lems of living, a favorite method of some postmodern
therapists (White, 1990).
Anything Goes?
Some people are critical toward postmodernism be-
cause they think many truths and many possible realities
means “anything goes.” I believe the very opposite is
true. Once we lose an absolute and factual universe, we
are only left with the values that we stand for. We cannot
manage a world without some consensual truths, even if
we challenge absolute truths, and in order to live a com-
munal life we cannot manage a world without standards
of normality that we as social workers might well be in a
position to enforce, wittingly or unwittingly.
Although the four points I have made above are
quite encompassing, we could generalize them to an even
greater extent. Philosophers have reminded us that all the
activities of our life are embedded with assumptions
about the right kind of life that a person should lead. Val-
ues, it is said, are not superimposed on a constructed re-
ality, but the very construction of social reality (and by
extension normality) is based on and intertwined with, in
John Christopher’s words, (1996) “moral visions.”

Cultural Values
There are mental health professionals who claim
that they accept and respect all cultural differences. But
this is easier said than done, and one need not be a stu-
dent to be puzzled and confused when confronted with
cultural values that contradict our social work values. I
believe that some cultures and some subcultures in our
own society are more benign than others, and that we
should be ethically allowed to guide our clients toward
more, rather than less, humane cultural possibilities. It is
also true that some of our clients’ values are not cultur-
ally based but have arisen as a response to oppression,
and this is an important distinction. Maybe I should have
made this fifth and most important point: values deter-
mine our clients’ goals when they seek help, as well as
our own goals as counselors. Sometimes the counseling
situation is viewed as a hermeneutic dialogue between
these two sets of goals.
Definition
Forgive me for being already way beyond my intro-
duction without having attended to defining the concept
of normality, concentrating on its common usage rather
than on purely dictionary definitions, and here I lean
upon and expand some of the pioneering work by Offer
and Sabshin (1984).
One meaning of normality refers to a statistical av-
erage, or more accurately, a statistical mode. Not a true,
one, but a widespread condition as imagined by people.
When people say “I had a normal childhood” or “I have
a normal sex life,” they usually refer to an imagined so-
cial norm. In this sense, normality is meant positively
with the connotation of nondeviant and socially accept-
able events but does not suggest any excellence. Some-
times such a use of normality can also refer to mediocrity.
A teacher once told me that my child had “normal intel-
ligence,” which upset me greatly until I learned that she
compared her with her classmates, a group of gifted chil-
dren. This example highlights that most people who use
“normal” in the sense of “average,” have a reference
group in mind and that this reference group may not be
considered normal by other people.
A second meaning of normality refers to normality
as a highly positive value, not just absence of physical or
mental disorder. We might call this “normality as a men-
tal health ideal.” Perhaps it is this meaning of normality
as desirable behavior that is closest to our own common
use. It is a meaning that is, of course, driven by our val-
ues about the good life, such as the desirability of the
longest possible life and the right to happiness, and rela-
335
Freud • The Social Construction of Normality
tively nonviolent domestic relations, and all rather mod-
ern ideas.
These two usages create a great deal of confusion, es-
pecially if normality refers to a presumed statistical aver-
age. For example, consider the widespread incidence of al-
coholism and/or depression around the world. Or
consider the prevalence of child sexual molestation in this
country as well as other countries. Normal, in terms of
average, thus becomes abnormal, in terms of ideal. One
might think that such a stark discrepancy between some
mental health ideal and actual conditions is a startling sit-
uation. Either our social structures are not conducive to
mental health, or the ideals of mental health are indeed so
utopian that they have become useless and need revision.
Certainly, in the area
of sexuality, people’s actual
behaviors seldom match
official norms.
The third meaning of normality refers to convention-
al behavior based on current community standards of a
presumed majority of people. It refers to the behavior or
rather presumed behavior of one’s friends and neighbors.
It means not being weird, eccentric, or insisting on one’s
own way of doing things. When people use the word ab-
normal, they usually refer to this sense of normal, and it
is here that normality is equated with being good and ac-
ceptable while abnormality is reprehensible, deviant, per-
haps even illegal. Most people view it normal, for exam-
ple, to grow up heterosexual and abnormal and therefore
objectionable, to develop any other way. You can appre-
ciate how this third use of normal can include participa-
tion in every form of atrocity human beings have been
able to invent. I now have given three possible definitions
of normality upon which I want to expand.
Normal Sex
Psychotherapy and the psychological theories on
which the institution is based have been given the so-
ciopolitical function of judging and maintaining stan-
dards of acceptable normal behavior. This is seldom done
arbitrarily since psychological theories leaning on my
third definition of normality are apt to be a mirror of the
conventions of their time. For example, we have been
FAMILIES IN SOCIETY • Volume 80, Number 4
taught that psychoanalytic theory was a radical depar-
ture from the usual conventions, but Michel Foucault
(1976) has suggested that Freud’s sexual theories, far
from shocking the burghers of Vienna, were instead, a re-
flection of the nineteenth century intense preoccupation
with sex, perhaps similar to the twentieth century im-
mersion in violence.
We may have been pressured to come to terms with
homosexuality, but many of us might still insist that there
are natural and perverse ways of being sexual. A cross-
dresser or fetishist is said to be perverse. Perversity is a
category that society has constructed to forbid or at least
discourage certain sexual practices. We might be “in-
stinctively” repelled by perverse practices because we
were socialized that way. Yet, we know that different sex-
ual practices have been viewed as perverse in different
historical periods. Masturbation was held responsible for
a wide range of mental illnesses in the eighteenth and
nineteenth century. I am uncertain just when oral sexual-
ity has been taken off the list of perversities. Some per-
versities, like voyeurism, may be illegal in one context
and recreational in another context such as in the form
of adult videos.
Certainly, in the area of sexuality, people’s actual be-
haviors seldom match official norms. Each time a new bi-
ography of some famous person is published we find,
perhaps with increasingly less surprise, that their public
image did not conform to their actual private sexual be-
havior. Mary Catherine Bateson (1984) was blamed
when she revealed that her mother, Margaret Mead, had,
besides her four husbands, a longtime woman lover. I
think her decision to reveal her mother’s secret was a
courageous move, helping to normalize millions of bisex-
ual persons. Currently our politicians — when subjected
to scrutiny about their sexual conduct — are also found
wanting, creating the dilemma of upholding a social
order — a standard of sexual normality — that does not
exist in actual practice.
I could write at great length about the changing stan-
dards of normal child rearing. Space constraints allows
only one arbitrary example. People of my generation were
raised by a rigid four-hour feeding schedule. I have heard
stories of mothers who had to be locked into their rooms
while listening to their babies’ daily screams of hunger,
hour after hour, month after month. Presumably this
practice readied the infant for an orderly and punctual
adult life. Mothers who currently do not feed their chil-
dren when they are hungry might be viewed as abusive —
a vivid example of how norms of one period become
transgressions in the next generation. It is also an exam-
336
ple of one area of cultural practice of which I want to in-
sist that, while there is a range of acceptable cultural child
rearing differences, there are better or worse ways of rais-
ing children.
Once a theory of normality is established—let us say
a widespread theory such as Erikson’s (1950) stages of
development, later enlarged into the expected phases of
the adult life cycle (Levinson, 1978) complete with its
midlife crisis—description becomes prescription, which is
then transformed into a desirable standard of normal be-
havior to be upheld and maintained by the educational
system, the religious system, the legal system, and of
course the psychotherapeutic system, and to which every
section of the population has to measure up to or be
found deficient. The midlife crisis is, by the way, a good
example of having been en vogue for some years, to the
extent that everyone from thirty to sixty suffered from
such a crisis, and then it died a merciful death.
In times of moral crisis,
it is abnormal behavior
that comes closest to the ideal
of humanistic values.
Mental Health Professionals and the Family
Mental health professionals have added to the con-
fusion between normal as average and normal as desir-
able, by writing as if their theoretical utopian ideals were
common and widespread norms. This is especially true
when we teach and write about families. For many years,
psychological textbooks, children’s first schoolbooks,
and of course the popular media, described family life in
such glowing terms that each family fell short of the pub-
lic ideal of family as “a haven in a heartless world,”
(Lasch, 1977) and its members lived in private shame
about their own particular defective family. I even think
the excessive expectations of what a good marriage
ought to look like contributed to the rising disappoint-
ment and sense of betrayal when the idealistic standards
and the stark reality simply did not match. It is amusing
to hear some of the public outcries about Arlie
Hochschild’s (1997) Time Bind, in which she declares the
very opposite, namely that work is a haven against a
problematic family, a new wisdom that many women and
men had known long ago.

The passing of the classical textbook family of dad,
mom, son, daughter, and dog is forever being lamented
by politicians, but its decline can apparently not be
stopped. Not only can mom be a single parent, but dad
may be an unknown donor of semen used for artificial in-
semination. There may be two lesbian moms or two gay
dads. A child may be born to a thirteen-year-old mother
and not be welcomed by anyone, or else children may
have a whole series of stepparents. This latter case may
give them a sense of being surrounded by loving adults,
or alternately, shuttled back and forth between quarrel-
ing adults who all lay claim on them. These two last al-
ternatives are a good example of how the same circum-
stances may have different consequences depending on
the problem-solving skills a divorcing family can develop
and, indeed, which we may help them develop. The new
diversity of possible family forms has had the consider-
able benefit of helping to destigmatize any one of them,
which is generally true when diversity is introduced into
a situation. Yet, I maintain, as I mentioned earlier, that
even in these revolutionary times, we as social workers
responsible for the welfare of children, are called upon to
apply some standards of normality regarding how chil-
dren are reared in families. Some social workers, like
Froma Walsh (1993), have done important pioneering
work in this area, substituting for the old structural def-
initions, new and creative definitions of desirable family
processes. We have thus happily traveled from the bro-
ken families and illegitimate children of my social work
beginnings, to families that either do or do not provide
the emotional climate conducive to the development of
its members. Walsh points to new standards of family co-
hesion, flexibility, open communication, and problem-
solving skills as offering new criteria of optimal normal-
ity, while also taking unique circumstances into account.
I used to assign my competent and mostly well-
functioning social work graduate students short bio-
graphical essays and was appalled when year after year, I
read about the massive pathology in their families, in-
cluding alcoholism, of course, mental illness, intrafamil-
ial violence, etc. Other teachers have had similar experi-
ences. The average, normal family is not anything like the
“good enough” family we mental health professionals
might hope for and use as a standard against which we
measure our clients.
The students themselves were divided in their own
evaluation of their families. The more middle class and
more psychologically sophisticated students tended to
blame their parents. Others, mostly those from working
class or racial minority backgrounds, bound to their fam-
337
Freud • The Social Construction of Normality
ilies with strong guilt and loyalty ties, were disinclined to
be critical of their parents and tended to view their back-
grounds as normal. One could debate which self-
definition is more conducive to mental health. Psychody-
namic theory suggests that a realistic evaluation of paren-
tal failings and acknowledgment of childhood traumas
are important aspects of self-development and eventual
healing. We think that people who ignore their own suf-
fering, past or present, eventually pay a high price. In spite
of the advantages of this approach, there is also a danger
that excessive embracing of a victim identity may lead to
becoming embedded in this status, rather than leaving it
behind. Interest in explanations for one’s behavior and
suffering replaces a readiness for change. We should not
look for an either/or answer, yet I consider this question
one of the important unsolved issues of trauma theory.
Reframing Lives
Actually, as we continually reconstruct our own his-
tory, we might switch back-and-forth in our own evalua-
tions of whether we had a normal childhood, given the
confusion of standards of normality. I used to think I had
had a difficult childhood, an abnormal one. Then I became
a social worker and learned what a bad childhood could
be like: being abused, neglected, persecuted, starved, etc.,
and suddenly I changed my reference group and decided I
had had a privileged, well-protected childhood.
An effective technique of brief psychotherapy is to
normalize a particular behavior or situation. Sometimes
the best we can do for people is to help them accept
themselves with their particular strengths and vulnerabil-
ities. I had a client who worried about having frequent
anxiety attacks in response to relationship problems. I
highlighted his accomplishments as a competent busi-
nessman (he made and sold ice-cream) and encouraged
him to accept himself as he was, with his high emotion-
ality and “super-caring style” as having advantages
(being a good and feeling person) as well as costs (suffer-
ing pain and anxiety).
Seeking out the pathological core of every phe-
nomenon is a use of psychoanalytic theory in which all
human motives are, by definition, suspect. In recent
years, some mental health professionals have turned mat-
ters around, seeking for seeds of strength in discouraging
situations. Reframing is an admirable technique, but like
all else, it has its shadows. Economics seem to have a cru-
cial role in defining who is in need of mental health ser-
vices. Insurance companies who pay for these services
want us to declare everyone as normal, while mental
health professionals who need patients are more inclined
FAMILIES IN SOCIETY • Volume 80, Number 4
to define people as needing psychotherapy, and both may
be right. The whole point of this article is to alert us to
the uncertain shifting boundary between the social con-
structions of normality and abnormality.
Normal Emotions
Our cultural norms even dictate the appropriate
emotions that are to be felt at various occasions (Nunley
& Averill, 1996). Indeed, the absence of certain emotions
or the expression of wrong emotions are bound to create
social havoc. Many of us would view the teaching of
proper and differentiated emotions expected by our cul-
ture as an appropriate therapeutic task. Consider some-
one who does not feel gratitude when “appropriate.” We
have even learned that when expected emotions are not
forthcoming, for example, grief at a parent’s death, we
declare them to have been repressed.
Combat as a Normal Life Experience
There is another issue of normality I wish to raise,
namely the grim consequences of certain normal life ex-
periences. In World War I, soldiers who collapsed in bat-
tle were called “shell shocked,” and everything was done
by the military psychiatrists, including giving them
frightful electric shocks, to get them over this “abnormal
condition” and back into battle. In World War II the phe-
nomenon continued under different diagnoses. Now we
have studies that find that an alarming number of men
who have experienced active combat subsequently live
with life-long symptoms of post-traumatic stress disor-
ders (PTDS), to a greater or lesser degree (Journal of
Traumatic Stress, 1997).
Nobody would call PTDS a normal condition, yet it
appears to be the natural consequence, not only of agreed
upon, albeit not very unusual, destructive life experiences
like torture, natural disaster, concentration camps, or child
abuse, but of the normal patriotic duties that young men
are expected to perform for their country. Human beings
are a very adaptive species, but there are biological limits
to human adaptation, which brings me back to values.
Anything Goes Revisited — Humanistic Values
In a recent controversial book, the author Daniel
Goldhagen (1996) accuses the German people of having
been abnormal during the Nazi period. He meant that
they did not embrace the supposedly pervasive humanis-
tic values of Western civilization. It was a different thesis
from that of Hannah Arendt (1963), who viewed Eich-
mann for example, as a “normal” bureaucrat who was
simply following orders. Arendt’s thesis of “the banality
338
of evil” was severely criticized, but I merely see it as a
clash between the concept of normality as an utopian
ideal and my third definition of normality as joining your
neighbors in a lynching party, indulging in mindless
vengefulness, and appalling cruelties, that most of us do
not recognize in our own emotional repertory. Yet we
have seen with horror and astonishment how easily sav-
agery can be unleashed, not only in Germany (although
Germans were exceptionally proficient and methodical),
but in every nation, in every continent, in every racial
group. There were some Germans who did not participate
in the Holocaust, but they were the abnormal ones, the
ones that did not follow the accepted and even coercively
expected community norms of torturing and killing whole
groups of other people defined as inferior or subhuman.
In times of moral crisis, it is abnormal behavior that
comes closer to the ideal of humanistic values.
Conflicting Values
The reason why the concept of normality has
become so fuzzy to the point of making the very word
normal a problematic word, is that as a society, we can
no longer agree on our values. There is a current debate
to abolish “no-fault divorce” in some of our states be-
cause the policy is suspected of encouraging divorce. Do
we want a young couple in constant conflict and mutual
lack of respect to stay together for the sake of the chil-
dren? Is it desirable for an old couple whose relationship
has died long ago to stay together and take care of each
other? Should we honor and stay in helpful touch with
our old parents who may have been uncaring, negligent,
or perhaps cruel when we were children? Is patriotism a
virtue? Is readiness to die for one’s country or live an
emotionally crippled life forever after a war a sign of
manly courage and nobility? Is abortion a tragic loss of a
potential Beethoven or an act of responsibility? Should
self-seeking, called self-actualization, or altruism be more
praised? I would assume that many readers of this article
might have very different opinions on these issues. Yet,
these are questions that we meet in our daily social work
practice, and our personal views will influence our reac-
tions. It might even be best to admit our own biases to
our clients and engage in honest debates with them re-
calling the hermeneutic dialogue I referred to earlier.
Normality and the Code of Ethics
I think the very realization of many possible truths
and our uncertain empirical research, along with the idea
that all theories have political shadows — rather than
leading us to the conclusion that “anything goes” — have

to the contrary turned us toward greater reliance on
some common ethical standards. I am referring to our
Code of Ethics, which we knowingly have constructed
through a consensual process led by our professional col-
leagues. Our Code of Ethics has become a bastion that
protects our practice and guides our actions, perhaps re-
cently even more so than the theoretical frameworks on
which we used to rely. We have come to understand that
ethical, legal, and clinical issues are inextricably interwo-
ven. We can view codes of ethics in general as profes-
sional constructions of normality that guide us in an age
of ambiguity. Yet, the social work code of ethics, in all its
pristine newness, does not solve all our problems. It rais-
es issues of enforced practice conformity; it does not ad-
dress the important issue of who will receive and pay for
our services; more importantly, it does not address the
larger issue of social justice without which our services
may often be futile.
The Personal Is the Political
The stark discrepancy between normality as average
and normality as an ideal could lead us to seek the roots
of dysfunctional behavior in our cultural arrangements,
rather than in individual histories, but we are generally
reluctant to do so. Psychotherapy and most human ser-
vices at their best, incorporate many humanistic values.
Ideally, they stand for attentiveness and respect for each
individual, no matter how humble or deficient in the eyes
of society. It values confidentiality, non-exploitation,
honesty, self-knowledge, responsibility, and compassion.
But in a capitalist society, the human services are in dan-
ger of becoming yet another commercial enterprise,
which is by definition, embedded in the profit motive
with people as commodities. Unless we recognize the
moral aspects of our work, put ethical principles as its
very highest purpose, and insist on the interaction be-
tween societal arrangements and mental health, it will
become just one more consumer enterprise competing
with cosmetic surgery and Disneyland as the royal road
to happiness. We are at a turning point in our professions
and have to make some choices. I view the current crisis
in the field as the conflict between social work values and
the values of the larger society as expressed by our elect-
ed delegates.
Many of us have started to feel hopeless and helpless
about current trends of so-called managed care, of con-
stantly diminishing resources for our clients, of the con-
339
Freud • The Social Construction of Normality
struction of even more prisons and the new institution of
chain gangs as the only response to structural escalating
violence. Do we live in a just society when some members
of the society earn up to one hundred times as much as
other at least equally-hard-working citizens? Are we
going to be owned by insurance companies? Are we giv-
ing up on fighting for our clients? The time may have
come, in alliance with other mental health professionals,
to construct a manifesto that defines the boundaries
within which we can fill our societal functions as
guardians of normality, constructors of good citizens,
and protectors of children. Maybe the moment has come
for us to behave abnormally in its third definition.
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Sophie Freud is professor emerita, Simmons College School of Social
Work, Boston, MA.
Original manuscript received: July 7, 1998
Accepted: August 1, 1998