[Discontinuities and reappearances: between the normal and the pathological in the theory of social control]

This text highlights ambiguities and gaps in the distinction between pathology and normality in the social and individual ambits dating back to the late nineteenth century and reemerging in another guise in contemporary times. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, many authors adopted the theory of atavic criminality defended by Italian criminal anthropologists led by Lombroso. The French school criticized Italian biological determinism and left to the 'psi' sciences the aspects it deemed to be the individual dimension of criminality. Taking advantage of this space, psychiatry created the 'psychopath', inheritor in many ways of the 'innate criminal', and today accepted as a psychopathological category. In this context, the article focuses on social control involving the distinction between pathology and normality in the social and individual spheres.