by Marmee Cosico

Created on: December 16, 2009

It is often said that it is only a thin hairline of difference between mental illness and mental health. We live in a chaotic life with both extremes of our behaviors. From childhood transitions of human growth up to the decline of our aging years, we all encountered mental or emotional disturbances but tried our best to achieve an optimum mental balance.

The idea that we are all "borderline" neurotics was started by Sigmund Freud which is still the most popular trend regarding normality among psychoanalysts. It was labeled that normality is an ideal fiction which is the acceptance of the universality of neurosis. Freud believed that our indefinite emotions is the alteration of the ego. However, through the years some psychoanalysts later developed their own independent systems of basic notions of normality. In Jungian psychology, the healthy person strives for perfection and tends toward adequacy and completeness within the framework of society he belongs. Carl Jung believed in the process of forming and specializing one's individual nature with the goal of personality development within a group setting. Here the individual is not a separate being and has a "collective relationship" with the community.  And this process of individual differentiation must lead to a deeper and universal collective solidarity, and not to one's "isolation". On the other hand, Erik Erikson's concept of personality development is the successful mastery of the seven (7) stages of development essential to the attainment of  of normal adult functioning  and maturity. And in every stages, the "ego" is subjected to a number of trials, disruptions and potential crisis in one's life span. He believes that a mature and "normal" person is one who successfully overcome the obstacles in each and every stage of his development. Note that Erikson defines normality in terms of the end product of one's behavior over a certain period of time. Now, according to Alfred Adler, the ideally normal individual is one who exhibited the greatest benefit to society. Adler says that when one considers human normality, it is both important and crucial to determine whether the individual is a burden or an asset to society at large and whether he/she contributes towards the progressive development of man.

In the past century, there were some psychiatric studies conducted to both normal and abnormal populations. The studies of Masterson et al. is an investigation in which an absence

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