What you aren’t

Young psychiatrists in state mental hospitals who are sympathetic to the plight of the patients sometimes express distance from their administrative medical role by affecting shirts open at the collar, much as do socialists in their legislative offices . . . What we have in these cases is a special kind of status symbol — a disidentifier . . . telling others not what he is but what he isn’t quite.

Erving Goffman, Encounters: Two Studies in the Sociology of Interaction, 1961