ABSTRACT
Mrs Ramon reminds clinicians forcefully in her paper of a point that they are apt to forget: psychological normality and abnormality are not qualities that reside in an individual, but are attributions made by one person about another. To understand such attributions, it is not sufficient to refer to the characteristics of the person about whom they are made; they arise from the impact he makes on the attributor and therefore depend equally on the attributor's characteristics. Mrs Ramon's analysis appears to be aimed at attributions of a particular kind of abnormality – madness, insanity, or schizophrenia – and the analysis is more penetrating. The need to impose a structure on the chaos of raw experience, to attach meaning to the experienced world, to predict and control events, is imperative. With regard to the formulation of theories of psychological normality and abnormality, clinicians strongly endorse Mrs Ramon's injunction to recognize the existence of a variety of avenues to knowledge.
