ABSTRACT
This chapter explores ways of thinking about the meaning of smell and odour in psychotherapeutic interventions with homeless individuals and those with diagnoses of enduring mental illness. It argues that the perceived permeability of social structures and hierarchies, alongside the precariousness of our hold within those hierarchies, creates fears of all forms of boundary-crossing in the social environment. The social anthropologist Mary Douglas provides a conceptual framework for the exploration of social meanings of ‘being dirty’ and odorous. If the extreme and absolute nature of contemporary reactions to the malodorous are rooted in wider existential anxieties about human society, these reactions also bear the historical trace of deep concerns about urban social relations in terms of illness, mortality and morality. In a society where the convention is to abstain from olfactory communication, or to perfume discreetly over it, to smell in public is to be greedy for space and for air.
