ABSTRACT
Many things a therapist cannot do. He or she cannot pay off a client’s debts; or bring back a dead relative or a straying lover. He or she cannot change the government or the past or the company policy of the client’s employer. In many ways the therapist is quite powerless. Ideally, to ease psychopathology the world-inclusion-of-person needs to be changed. Alas, the therapist can usually only work with individuals and small groups. This solution is by its very nature far from ideal-as Freud himself recognised-and in some cases, such as those of depressed lower -class women whose difficulties are often largely social in origin (though not entirely so-see Brown 1991), working at the individual intrapsychic level alone can to a greater or lesser degree be actually misguided (Smail 1993).
