What is normalcy?

Abstract

Normalcy is a controversial concept in modern psychotherapy, which suffers from the postmodernist woes of seeking to question the very normative foundations of what is personal and collective wellbeing and thus, also, ‘mental health’. In this paper we reaffirm the concept of normalcy along the Lacanian psychoanalytic lines of socialization and internalization of projections of virtue and the underlying values adopted by the community. In the process, we distinguish between the constitutive elements of individual normalcy, resilience as an attribute of mental health (and, thus, of normalcy) that is associated with the propositional characteristics of individual normalcy, and institutional and social normalcy as parallel to individual normalcy.