Abstract
From the studies of cultural anthropology and trans-cultural psychiatry, we reach the generalized definition of abnormality : it is what a society negatively sanctions among 'les signe marquees' which it situationally creates to define its boundary. A society releases its members' aggression by the defence mechanism to the targets including (1) others as rivals, (2) others as scapegoats and (3) the attacker himself, whom they regard abnormal. The society selecting the target of (1) type is the multiple society where the attacker must compete with the attacked for the majority, and where the normals and the abnormals are both reduced to rivals. In that of (2) type the social norm is becoming unstable and they accuse witches as scapegoats to project their anxiety. In that of (3) type the members internalizing unified social norm can not release their aggression to the others but to themselves. Another type of society avoiding social conflict is the flux society at a cost of low level of social integration. There is the spectrum of societies with a scale of social integration from the rigid, unified, small-scale and face-to-face society to the loose, multiple, large-scale and fragmental ones, and each actual society is distributed in that spectrum. The types of society correspond to the types of abnormality. We can guess the group characteristics from the index of abnormals which it creates.
In addition we must make distinction to analyse abnormality (1) unit level (individual), (2) inter-unit level (interaction process) and (3) system level (social system). By considering the types of abnormals and its levels we can get the general theory of abnormality which enables a crosscultural analysis and which gives various studies theoretical consistency of their object and method.
