I've just sent another of my columns off to the The Journal of Critical Psychology, Counselling and Psychotherapy, so it's time to publish an earlier one here again. The theme for this issue was "Norma, Norman or Normal".Goodbye Norma Jean. This obviously had to begin with someone called Norma, but Marilyn Monroe didn’t make the cut. Instead, I’ve gone for the English-born piano prodigy turned Hollywood actress Norma Varden, who appeared in both Casablanca and The Sound of Music.
In Casablanca she’s the wife of the Englishman who has his wallet stolen right at the start of the film. In The Sound of Music she’s the housekeeper who tells Julie Andrews, who has just found a frog in her bed, “You're lucky. With Fraulein Helga, it was a snake.”
There was talk of Varden playing the Mother Superior, but Hollywood elbows get very sharp when a top nun role is up for grabs.
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Our next caller is Gerrard Winstanley. Gerrard, what’s on your mind this evening?
O what mighty Delusion, do you, who are the powers of England live in! That while you pretend to throw down that Norman yoke, and Babylonish power, and have promised to make the groaning people of England a Free People; yet you still lift up that Norman yoke, and slavish Tyranny, and holds the People as much in bondage, as the Bastard Conquerour himself, and his Councel of War.
Winstanley was the leader of the Diggers or True Levellers during the Civil War and Commonwealth. His words here are a quotation from The True Levellers Standard Advanced, published in 1649.
The idea that the people of England laboured under the Norman Yoke – ruled by the descendants of William I and his generals – had a shadowy existence through the Middle Ages and came into the light when central authority broke down during the Civil War.
And that yoke is still round our necks today. In 2011, Gregory Clark, a professor of economics at the University of California, published research showing that people with Norman surnames – Mandeville, Percy, Darcy – live three years longer than the rest of us and leave significantly larger estates.
Studying the probate records of those with "rich" and "poor" names for every decade since the 1850s, he found the extreme differences in accumulated wealth had narrowed over time. Yet his conclusion was still that:
Over the last 150 years, the rate of social mobility revealed by surnames is slower than most social scientists have estimated – and is possibly slower than in the middle ages.
Or to put it another way, the wealthy hold us as much in bondage as "the Bastard Conquerour himself, and his Councel of War".
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I’ve never been that keen on being normal, so I was heartened by the rise of the neurodiversity movement and its insight that conditions like autism, ADHD and dyslexia weren’t disorders to be fixed, but part of the rich spectrum of human cognitive diversity.
But that movement worries me now, both because it accepts the coherence of such diagnoses, even welcomes them as providing an identity, and because it takes it as axiomatic that cognitive differences are a reflection of differences in people’s brains.
When I began to consider these questions, I was sceptical about the concept of ADHD. Weren’t the disorder’s supposed symptoms just a list of the things about children that most irritate teachers? Don’t pharmaceutical companies famously “sell the disease, not the drug”? Wasn’t Ritalin marketed as a treatment for depression and fatigue – particularly “Tired Housewife Syndrome” – before ADHD was invented? I once wrote an article for OpenMind along just these lines.
This view is deeply out of fashion now, but I’m not convinced it’s wrong. When I see a headline like “Third of UK parents have sought special needs assessment for their child, survey finds,” it still seems to me that we should look at the social and educational pressures on parents and children rather than unthinkingly locate the problem inside the child’s brain.
Not only has the concept of ADHD won near-universal professional acceptance, it has escaped into the wild, evolved and bred with autism to sire AuDHD. This diagnosis may not have received its clinical imprimatur, but it’s everywhere online.
You may see its arrival as an important new insight into the causes of cognitive differences, or you may reflect that when the symptoms of ADHD and high-functioning autism are as loosely drawn as they are, at least online, there’s bound to be some overlap between the two clusters.
These days I don’t get to see the professional literature so often, so the ADHD discourse I come across is on social media or in conversations overheard in coffee shops. What strikes me about it is the confidence with which people refer to “the ADHD brain” or even “the ADHD nervous system”. That confidence, I believe, runs far ahead of the scientific consensus on how far the condition can be identified by neuroimaging or any other technology.
People obviously derive comfort, meaning and membership of a community from their diagnoses, but that in itself doesn’t guarantee their validity. I don’t have a conclusion to offer here, but I’ll remain an interested, if worried, observer of developments.
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I can remember the Sixties and lying in bed at eight o’clock, hearing the theme music of the police drama Softly Softly and wishing I could stay up to watch it.
When I did get to see it, I adopted Harry Hawkins, played by Norman Bowler, as my hero. Clive James once suggested he did little but open and close doors:
In any given episode, he would open or close every door in the police station. Sometimes he would open and close the same door in rapid succession. He would leave the room just so that he could open the door, close it behind him, open it again, and come back in.
But I liked him. And years later he reappeared as Frank Tate, the keystone of the relaunched soap opera Emmerdale, so he must have been able to act.
What I didn’t know then was that, in the Fifties, Bowler had been a member of the Soho set alongside Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud and John Minton.
So never despise a Norman – unless it’s Norman Wisdom, of course.
