Reflections on normality and abnormality in Edmund Husserl

In a crisis, the world on which we base our basic beliefs becomes problematic. We feel disoriented and lost and look for a radical “solution”, in order to survive. The world is felt and lived, more than thought, as something irrational. Our beliefs do not adhere to it and it does not seem to give rise to the fulfillment of our expectations. Ultimately, the familiar becomes threatening, what seemed safe becomes dangerous. The expression “we lack the soil” reflects the feeling of living in a crisis. These ideas, which we can find in the Husserlian texts on the problem of the crisis, arose, for the first time, in a reflection on culture, but they can have other applications. Our paper, by means of an analysis of the First Part of William Faulkner’s novel The Sound and the Fury, aims to investigate the relevance of Husserl’s analysis for the understanding of the psychic crisis.