ABSTRACT
Our ancestors of not so many centuries ago regarded any psychological anomaly with awe, attributing its origins to supernatural agencies. Among such anomalies were not only precognitive dreams, cases of miraculous healing, sleepwalking, and automatic behaviors, but all cases of severe psychopathology. The psychotic individual was said to be possessed by an evil spirit, an explanation that was also applied to the neurotic individual suffering from hysteria. Eventually, demons and spirits were given up as explanations of psychopathology. Behavior that in some way deviated from the statistical norm, or what most people regarded as normal behavior, was designated as abnormal and treatable by physical and psychological means.
