Asylums: Essays On The Social Situation Of Mental Patients And Other Inmates
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: No dust jacket
Pages: Good
Condition remarks: Condition as shown in image
In one of the most unsettling and intellectually rigorous works of 20th-century sociology, Erving Goffman turns the lens of social analysis onto the closed, regimented world of the psychiatric institution, exposing the hidden mechanics of power, identity, and control that govern life behind its walls. Asylums presents four landmark essays that chronicle the daily existence of mental patients and other institutionalised individuals, arguing that the very structures designed to treat and rehabilitate instead systematically strip individuals of their selfhood — a process Goffman terms the total institution. Drawing on his own covert fieldwork conducted at St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington D.C., Goffman illustrates with unflinching clarity how institutions manufacture conformity and dependency, revealing that the asylum is not merely a place of confinement but a social world unto itself, governed by its own rituals and hierarchies. His concept of the total institution has since become a cornerstone of sociological and psychiatric thought, influencing fields as diverse as criminology, political theory, and medical ethics. Written with sharp, sardonic precision, Asylums remains a profoundly subversive text — one that compels readers to question not just how society treats its most vulnerable, but what it truly means to be labelled mad in the first place.
Author: Erving Goffman
Format: Paperback
Genre: Psychology
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: No dust jacket
Pages: Good
Condition remarks: Condition as shown in image
In one of the most unsettling and intellectually rigorous works of 20th-century sociology, Erving Goffman turns the lens of social analysis onto the closed, regimented world of the psychiatric institution, exposing the hidden mechanics of power, identity, and control that govern life behind its walls. Asylums presents four landmark essays that chronicle the daily existence of mental patients and other institutionalised individuals, arguing that the very structures designed to treat and rehabilitate instead systematically strip individuals of their selfhood — a process Goffman terms the total institution. Drawing on his own covert fieldwork conducted at St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington D.C., Goffman illustrates with unflinching clarity how institutions manufacture conformity and dependency, revealing that the asylum is not merely a place of confinement but a social world unto itself, governed by its own rituals and hierarchies. His concept of the total institution has since become a cornerstone of sociological and psychiatric thought, influencing fields as diverse as criminology, political theory, and medical ethics. Written with sharp, sardonic precision, Asylums remains a profoundly subversive text — one that compels readers to question not just how society treats its most vulnerable, but what it truly means to be labelled mad in the first place.