Asylums by Erving Goffman Term Paper

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Asylums by Erving Goffman

The word "asylum" was once commonly a synonym for a sanctuary or save haven from oppression. However, in his text entitled Asylums, Erving Goffman made it clear that such institutions were more often warehouses for the mentally ill or so-called mentally ill rather than places of refuge, much less mental rehabilitation. Goffman's persuasive and pervasive critique of the mental health institutionalization system of 'the asylum' led to the rapid de-institutionalization of mental patients in the era after he wrote his work, Asylums, in 1962.

Like the military, the process of inculcation in the rhythms of life of an mental institution are what Erving Goffman calls the processes of becoming socialized into the role of an inmate in a "Total Institution," where the institution becomes a part of the inmate's fragile sense of self, rather than simply the place where he or she resides. (12-17) The characteristics of Total Institutions are particularly insidious in regards to mental institutions because although they supposedly are designed to cure or at least temper inmate pathology, as institutions themselves, mental institutions have pathological features in their procedural construction.

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As "Total Institutions" like prisons, they often cause pathological methods of living and dealing with life and building a self. For individuals with the most fragile sense of who they are as "selves" the institutionalization process into the asylum thus can be harrowing and self-defeating.

Total institutions are characterized by what the author entitles "batch living," for example, where the three spheres of home, work and play are collapsed into one, unlike those of normal, non-routine domestic life. Life in an asylum can be described as the antithesis of domestic living and also the antithesis of preparing inmates for reentering such a world and contributing to a prison-like atmosphere. The total institution of the asylum is also characterized….....

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