The Science of Normality

Psychology is the science of experience and behaviour. It situates human functioning and makes it intelligible. It accounts for the diversity of human experience without assigning value or judgement.

Basic psychological research is a science of normality. All applied fields build on it. Anyone who understands psychology primarily as a discipline of malfunctions sees only part of its subject matter.

The logic of normality is not unique to psychology. Other sciences follow the same structure: geography is not the science of natural disasters; architecture is not the science of structural failures; mechanical engineering is not the science of defects. Each discipline begins with functioning and describes deviations only against this background.

General Psychology and the Human Psychological Operating System

General Psychology is the subdiscipline that describes the psychological operating system of the human being: perception, memory, thinking, emotion, attention, learning. These fundamental processes are shared by all humans — independent of origin, gender or resources. Every form of individual experience rests upon them. General Psychology therefore provides the basis for the classification of psychological dynamics.

Emergency Mode

Under sustained load, something changes: how one decides, how one responds to others, what drives one and what no longer does. As a rule, such changes follow the logic of an intact system adapting to its conditions.

This system first ensures that the person remains able to function. It reallocates energy, shifts priorities and scales back whatever does not serve this protection.

This shows clearly, for instance, in the resources a person subjectively has at their disposal. For the system, protecting the person takes precedence; a decision-maker, by contrast, expects the resources to flow into their work as usual.

Both aims draw on the same reservoir. For a while, more can be drawn from it than flows back in; but if its level falls too far, the two aims come into conflict. Fewer resources then meet unchanged demands in both areas.

At first, the system tries to reconcile the two. This balance between conserving and advancing reduces the resources available to both aims. Those who keep their eyes chiefly on the work feel the reduced capacity, often strive harder and use up even more in doing so.

A state can thus arise in which the system can protect the person only by allotting still less to the work, and it becomes increasingly difficult to override this by will.

What goes on in a decision-maker in the process is, as a rule, the response of an intact system to the load that arises from the responsibility they bear and from their determination to live up to it. The same logic can lie behind much of what changes under load, including small things that only one notices oneself.

The Measure

The processes at work in emergency mode are old in evolutionary terms. They have always secured stability and often even physical survival. Whether the reallocation of resources described here is read as a malfunction or as an adaptation to the load depends on which of the two aims serves as the measure of evaluation. From a business perspective, it seems natural to see a malfunction. If, however, the protection of the person serves as the measure, the evaluation shifts: what a moment ago appeared to be a malfunction is then the successful adaptation of a system whose functioning is the foundation of every other aim.

Normality as a Stance

The work of the Psychological Private Office therefore rests on a consistent orientation towards the normal functional logic of human experience. It provides the framework within which every concern is understood and situated.

Only this perspective reveals how much of what is normal lies within a change. Those who understand this logic can govern it rather than be governed by it.

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