Asylums: Essays On the Social Situation of Mental Patients And Other Inmates (Peregrine books) - Softcover

Goffman, Erving

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140552197 ISBN 13: 9780140552195

Publisher: Penguin, 1988

Synopsis

What really goes on in a mental hospital? Are asylums genuine havens of rest from the pressures of society, or can they create even more crippling tensions in those already disturbed? How do mental patients adjust to their new life? And are their adjustments so very different from the reactions of members of other 'total institutions', such as army camps, monasteries, prisons and boarding schools? In these four controversial essays, Erving Goffman explores various types of closed community, all of which seek to mould their inmates to some socially approved purchase. He writes as an observer, not an official; and, like the British 'anti-psychiatrists', he is more concerned to interpret the experience of the patients than to justify the system which contains them. His first essay is a general portrait of life in a total institution; the other three consider special aspects of this existence: the sense of betrayal and loss of identity which afflicts the new patient; the flourishing underlife of prisons and hospitals by which inmates retain some self-respect; and the role of the staff in presenting to the inmate their view of his situation. Contents: Preface; Introduction; On the Characteristics of Total Institutions; The Moral Career of the Mental Patient; The Underlife of a Public Institution: A Study of Ways of Making Out in a Mental Hospital; The Medical Model and Mental Hospitalization: Some Notes on the Vicissitudes of the Tinkering Trades. Priced to compete with the newer 1991 edition

About this title

About the Author:

Erving Goffman (1922-1982) was one of the most influential sociologists of the twentieth century. He was Benjamin Franklin Professor of Anthropology and Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania.

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin
• Publication date: 1988
• ISBN 10: 0140552197
• ISBN 13: 9780140552195
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 336