Product Description

Asylums is an analysis of life in "total institutions"--closed worlds like prisons, army camps, boarding schools, nursing homes and mental hospitals. It focuses on the relationship between the inmate and the institution, how the setting affects the person and how the person can deal with life on the inside.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #35976 in Books
• Published on: 1991-08-29
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 336 pages

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.

Customer Reviews

Indispensable
As a Nurse Lecturer I recommend this book to all my mental health students. I first read it as a first year trainee psychiatric nurse and it saved my career. There I was sitting in a care of the elderly ward in a mental hospital thinking "what the (*&^ is going on here!?", ready to pack it in, and then I started to read this book. As I progressed through the book it all began to make sense and Goffman became my hero! What a man, what a researcher, what a writer. His theory is punctuated here and there with anecdotes and as such his writing is highly accessible. Fortunately, the world I experienced as a student and that Goffman wrote of is dying, but its vestiges linger and this book is still useful today. This book will one day become a historical account, but will always stand a a testimony to the need for and effectiveness of covert qualitative research.

A Classic of Enduring Relevance
The fact that this collection of essays has been in print for almost four decades is consistent with its enduring signficance. Although Goffman draws on his research in mental institutions, his writings in this book have much broader relevance. In particular, they have to do with the nature of identity, the processes whereby organizations and groupings seek to change the identities and selves of their members, and the strategies used by group members to resist those changes. At a broader level, this book is about the relationship between person and the groups of which s/he is a part. Extremely well written, and very readable with excellent use of illustrative examples, this set of essays provides unparalleled insights into and understandings of the relation between person and society.

yes, ok, hmm - NO!!!
I'm an undergraduate sociologist, who unfortunatly had to read this book for his exams. If you have any choice in the matter I say leave it alone. Now.

Goffman... He is a marvel. He must have written the book for himself, as it's certainly not accesible to anyone else. I think the questions of identity that severe mental illness raises are both profound and interesting. Goffman chooses to pursue them ily, concentrating on his own theories, and forcing his observations (when he bothers to make them) to fit. Sadly, like many sociologists, Goffman feels the need to make grandiose proclaimations such as "patients thought such-and-such" then follow them up not with detailed accounts, not with carefully calculated statistics, not with patient testimonies... but with nothing. His central themes are simply ideas that he's dreamed up, based on little or nothing. The points he makes that do have a basis are almost always overly simplistic. For example, he talks of most patients being incarcerated for life. At the time this was written over 80% of patients under the age of 60 were discharged within five years. He talks of the terrible conditions in the asylums. This is partly true - but was it really due to the doctors attempting to exert their despotic control over the general populace, or was it that due to burgeoning numbers of people being commited, doctors had up to 500 patients each to cope with and little in the way of therapeutic treatment?

Throughout runs the underlying assumption that there is no such thing as mental illness - that it is created by society. I wonder what he thinks neurosyphilis is? The disease has been known for hundreds of years, as have the characteristic brain lesions the treponema spirochaetes cause. What about Korsakoff psychosis, or schizophrenia? Above all is the complete failure to realise that there is no difference between the brain (and it's biology), and the mind (and it's psycholgy). Psychology is simply very complex biology we don't yet understand - biology that is influenced by our experiences however.

Overall, I found Goffman's refusal to accept that biology has anything to with mental health deeply annoying, and illustrative of a mind that had formed it's conclusions without even looking at the reality.

Again, like his book on the self, avoid this. Try Edward Shorter's excellent A History of Psychiatry instead for a genuinely informed opinion.