ABSTRACT
A person may only to find that when he or she moves into a slightly more distal field of power there are new ‘forms’ of gender which make unfulfillable, and perhaps even for the greater part unintelligible, demands. The power actually conferred by mystified association with the powerful is, of course, nonexistent in the sense of the individual’s becoming a real intimate of the ‘celebrity’. The clinician’s consulting room becomes a microcosm supposedly containing all the explanatory material necessary for an adequate theory of ‘psychopathology’. The clinician occupies the centre of this microcosmic world as a kind of nonpathological scientific wizard, able to identify and expose the processes leading to the patient’s disorder and manipulate them such that the abnormalities are repaired. ‘Psychopathology’ can sometimes be rendered nonpathological through being given meaning by a ‘form’ not previously available.
