review by william caudill - asylums essays on the social situation of mental patients and other...

Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates. by ErvingGoffmanReview by: William CaudillAmerican Journal of Sociology, Vol. 68, No. 3, Studies on Formal Organization (Nov., 1962),pp. 366-369Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2774235 .Accessed: 26/06/2014 05:54

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366 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

political meetings, civic service, etc. As time devoted to work (in the economic sense) de- clines, time devoted to such obligations may increase to the point where one has no more "free" time than before. (2) The increased time given to leisure seems to increase rather than decrease the time spent at home, and the home becomes a repository of leisure-use things. (3) Although there is evidence that workers have little ego involvement in their jobs, this is not necessarily cause for alarm. Rather, the worker simply sells his time and skill in a business-like manner, ceasing to think about it after hours. "He is not bored with his job; he has come to terms with it." This is eminently sensible and rational. (4) The notion that people are helpless in the face of the great wave of leisure now sweeping over them is exaggerated if not false. Rather, man's cultural level (compared to 1850) has risen, and his inventiveness in his work will surely be applied to his leisure. These conclu- sions do not form the subject of particular sections of the book; they are touched upon in several places and may be said to emerge from the book as a whole.

Two valuable features of the book stand out. It is probably the most thorough coverage of the literature on leisure study, particu- larly the European materials, now available. Again and again one is impressed with the great volume of research going on in Europe, much of which, unfortunately, cannot be read by "English-only" sociologists. Nor is the defense that "the really good stuff will be translated" satisfactory, for most of it is not that good: It is simply as good as most American research and therefore no more likely to be translated. The coverage seems equally good for American materials, with the surprising omission of the work of Weiss and Morse.

The other especially valuable feature of the book is the many "essays." The book is full of insights which could in their own right form the subjects of research or even of books. For example, Anderson points out that we owe the increase in leisure to the Protes- tant ethic, which made intense concentration on work a virtue. Yet this very gift becomes a "problem" for one's success in work inca- pacitates one for enjoying the free time. Hence it is not really free but must be used to improve one's ability to work even more suc- cessfully. With reference to the complaint that people are becoming too passive in their

leisure, Anderson wonders whether "to live in a civilization so intensively stimulating as ours one [may] need . e . to acquire a degree of passivity or immunity." In his discussion of leisure among the aged, he reminds us that the use of time is a problem only among those without wealth and power. Leaders in many of the most important activities are usually old: for example, top diplomats, top church leaders, and top leaders in women's organization, trade unions, large corporations, and universi- ties. This is not a new idea, but it deserves greater attention. Perhaps the major problems of the aged are not leisure problems, but those of insufficient wealth and power.

Anderson's coverage of the main issues in the study of leisure is as wide as his coverage of the literature. But he omits, as do most students of leisure, a discussion of the "leisure workers"-the operator of the bowling alley, the golf pro, the theater usher, and, of course, the actor. They work so that others may play, and often their work is the play of others. The occupational community that Lip- set, Trow, and Coleman found among printers is certainly more widespread.

The book is well written and combines in- tensive examination of the research and a ju- dicious explication of the findings from it. At the same time, the wide scope and originality of this volume make it required reading for students of work and leisure.

EDWARD GROSS

University of Minnesota

Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates. By ERVING GOFFMAN ("Anchor Book"). Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Co., 1961. Pp. xiv+386. $1.45. Sociologists scarcely need an introduction

to these often brilliant and always provocative essays. The book begins with a reprinting (from Cressey's The Prison, 1961) of the longer version of Goffman's classic treatment of the characteristics of total institutions. The focus then narrows more specifically on the patient, first in terms of his moral career (re- printed from Psychiatry, XXII [1959], 123- 42), and next on his ways of making out in the underlife of the hospital. The final essay considers the lack of appropriateness of the


BOOK REVIEWS 367

medical-service model for characterizing the relation of professional psychiatric staff and patients within the context of the mental hospital. The book as a whole provides a full treatment of Goffman's analysis of the mental hospital and of his use of it as one illus- trative case in the development of the concept of total institutions and of a set of ideas concerning the structure of the self.

Goffman gathered the material for his essays during a year of observational study at St. Elizabeths Hospital. He self-consciously re- stricted the bulk of his observations to patients, and he says: "To describe the patient's situation faithfully is necessarily to present a partisan view" (pp. ix-x). The reader is thereby warned that the description of life in the hospital is through the patient's eyes as seen by Goffman, but the analytical and theo- retical ideas arising from the descriptive materials are adequately shorn of this limitation on perspective and stand clear by themselves. Perhaps in the future the other role groups in the hospital will be found by their Goffman.

Two central themes run throughout the book-the concept of total institutions and the structure of the self. Of these two, the presentation of total institutions is clearer, while the ideas about the self seem to me to be ambiguous and in need of further clarifica- tion.

Goffman defines a total institution as "a place of residence and work where a large number of like-situated individuals, cut off from the wider society for an appreciable pe- riod of time, together lead an enclosed, for- mally administered round of life" (p. xiii). In addition to mental hospitals, examples of total institutions are prisons, army barracks, ships, boarding schools, and monasteries.

The process by which an individual comes to enter a total institution is discussed by Goffman for mental hospitals in his second essay under the concept of career contingencies. The concept is apt because, as Goffman points out, "in the degree that the 'mentally ill' out- side hospitals numerically approach or sur- pass those inside hospitals, one could say that mental patients distinctively suffer not from mental illness, but from contingencies" (p. 135). There follows a sharply written description (esp. pp. 140-41) of how a person can be stripped of his rights and liberties without quite knowing this is happening, and end up

as a patient in a hospital with a next-of-kin transformed into a guardian.

Once an individual is admitted to a total institution, Goffman believes that he undergoes a process of mortification in which "he begins a series of abasements, degradations, humilia- tions, and profanations of self" (p. 14). Part- ly in response to these processes of mortification, Goffman sees the inmates as developing what he calls secondary adjustments which, collectively, form the underlife of the institution. Thus, secondary adjustments are defined as "any habitual arrangement by which a member of an organization employs unauthorized means, or obtains unauthorized ends, or both, thus getting around the organization's assumptions as to what he should do and get and hence what he should be" (p. 189). "These practices together comprise what can be called the underlife of the institution, being to a social establishment what an under- world is to a city" (p. 199).

In general, with regard to the concept of the total institution, I agree with Goffman when he says: "We now have a sizable literature on these establishments and should be in a position to supplant mere suggestions with a solid framework bearing on the anatomy and functioning of this kind of social animal" (p. 123). But I disagree with the strong implica- tion in his writing that an individual is un- likely to come through the experience of life in a total institution, and especially a mental hospital, somewhat the better (rather than the worse) for it. The basis for my disagree- ment lies in my negative reaction to Goffman's rather peculiar, and I think confused, view of the self. The ideas about the structure of the self shift and change from one essay to another and do not form as coherent a whole as do those about the total institution.

In his Introduction, Goffman says: "A chief concern is to develop a sociological version of the structure of the self" (p. xiii). This is a reasonable goal, but even a sociological self ought to have an inner as well as an outer face, and Goffman's self in his first essay strikes me as having a blank inner face. Along these lines, one of the steps reported in the process of mortification is the stripping from the individual of his "identity kit" which con- sists of "cosmetic and clothing supplies" that the individual needs "for the management of his personal front" (p. 20). My point is that life in any society always requires a set of


368 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

somewhat standard uniforms and behaviors, and an "identity kit" is necessary to maintain these, but certainly a person's "identity" -in the sense this term has come to have in current professional literature-goes deeper than a painted front. Goffman does not touch upon the point that an individual might not really need such a kit to maintain his identity.

In the second essay, in contrast to the first, Goffman says he will look at internal (or more personal) as well as at external (or more pub- lic) aspects of the self with regard to the moral career of the patient. He says: "One value of the concept of career is its two-sided- ness. One side is linked to internal matters held dearly and closely, such as image of self and felt identity; the other side concerns offi- cial position, jural relations, and style of life, and is part of a publicly accessible institutional complex" (p. 127). Goffman would seem to be talking to a degree about the more personal and internal aspects of the self when he says that a mental patient can free himself of the definition of self provided by the institution "when he learns that he can survive while acting in a way that society sees as destruc- tive of him" (p. 165). And yet a few pages later Goffman seems to deny the possibility of such a personal achievement:

The self, then, can be seen as something that resides in the arrangements prevailing in a social system for its members. The self in this sense is not a property of the person to whom it is at- tributed, but dwells rather in the pattern of social control that is exerted in connection with the person by himself and those around him. This special kind of institutional arrangement does not so much support the self as constitute it [p. 168].

I think there is the possibility of real con- fusion here. Does the self about which Goff- man speaks have an inner part or is it solely defined by patterns of social control? In his third essay on the underlife of a total institution, Goffman clarifies this question, and at the end of the essay gives the fullest state- ment in the book concerning his ideas about the self:

The practice of reserving something of oneself from the clutch of an institution is very visible in mental hospitals and prisons but can be found in more benign and less totalistic institutions, too. I want to argue that this recalcitrance is not an in- cidental mechanism of defense but rather an es- sential constituent of the self.

Sociologists have always had a vested interest in pointing to the ways in which the individual is formed by groups, identifies with groups, and wilts away unless he obtains emotional support from groups. But when we closely observe what goes on in a social role . . . we always find the individual employing methods to keep some dis- tance, some elbow room, between himself and that with which others assume he should be iden- tified.

. . . Perhaps we should further complicate the construct by elevating these qualifications to a central place, initially defining the individual, for sociological purposes, as a stance-taking entity, a something that takes up a position somewhere between identification with an organization and opposition to it, and is ready at the slightest pres- sure to regain its balance by shifting its involvement in either direction. It is thus against something that the self can emerge.... I have argued the same case in regard to total institutions. May this not be the situation, however, in free society, too?

Without something to belong to, we have no stable self, and yet total commitment and attach- ment to any social unit implies a kind of selfless- ness. Our sense of being a person can come from being drawn into a wider social unit; our sense of selfhood can arise through the little ways in which we resist the pull. Our status is backed by the solid buildings of the world, while our sense of personal identity often resides in the cracks [pp. 319-20].

There are more cogent ways of conceiving of the self than in this discontinuous fashion where one is presented with a rather bland social self and, apparently, a somewhat harried and antagonistic personal self that "resides in the cracks." If life entails being against something, if it is seen as a game in which one is always busy presenting a front, then there is little time to integrate the part of the self that faces outward with that which faces inward, or even to conceive of a reconciliation between these two.

In general, then, what evaluation is to be made of this book? It is a good book, good mainly because of its clearness in looking at mental hospitals as one type of total institution and in providing biting concepts by means of which to see such institutions. Such clearness is, however, muddied by the almost endless provocative descriptive comparisons of mental hospitals with jails, seedy boarding schools, poorly run ships, and so on. A few sharp comparisons are fine; fifty piled one on top of the other serve to cloud the argument.


BOOK REVIEWS 369

It would be possible to understand such a proliferation of descriptive comparisons in terms of human outrage on the part of an observer initially working in a large mental hospital, but, in Goffman's presentation, there seems to be something more implied-a general view of society and the self.

WILLIAM CAUDILL

National Institute of Mental Health

The Church as a Social Institution. By DA- VM 0. MOBERG. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, Inc., 1962. Pp. vi+ 569. $10.00. The subtitle of Dr. Moberg's text is The

Sociology of American Religion, although a more accurate subtitle might have been The Sociology of American Church Organizations, since the author's primary concern is with the forms of institutionalized religion in the United States. The book is divided into seven substantive sections: "Characteristics of American Churches," "Types of Churches," "Social Functions and Dysfunctions of the Church," "Social Processes and the Church," "Inter-Institutional Relations," "The Social Psychology of American Religion," and "Pro- fessional Leadership in the Church."

As a textbook for college and first-year graduate school courses in the sociology of religion, the volume is admirable, but one sus- pects that it will see its most frequent use in seminary courses. Moberg's treatment of the materials under consideration is concise and comprehensive, his judgments balanced, and his familiarity with the literature encyclo- pedic. Although some sociologists may have doubts about a book on religion by one who believes in religion, there seems little reason to question that The Church as a Social Insti- tution is far and away the best available text in the field. The only serious omission of which the reviewer is aware is the lack of any reference to organized labor in a chapter on "The Church and Social Problems"; the So- cial Gospel movement is discussed in another chapter, but nothing is said about the labor teachings of the National Council of Churches and the only allusion to the labor theories of the Catholic church is a footnote reference to an extremely unfavorable article.

Like all textbooks Moberg's volume labors under the faults that are inevitable in text-

books. It is not able to incorporate the latest research findings; for example, there is some recent evidence that American Catholics are no less achievement-oriented than American Protestants. The book is forced to limit itself to documentable propositions; thus, on deci- sive matters such as the direction of the development of American pluralism or the emer- gence of a religion of Americanism, the author cannot speculate but must be content with quoting Will Herberg. It is obliged to strive for balance and therefore run the risk of being bland; for example, the chapter on "Inter- faith Conflict" treats the problem adequately but does not seem to get at the core of the problem, whatever that core may be.

A second series of difficulties may arise from the nature of the subject. In his Intro- duction Moberg suggests that the non-believ- er may lack the empathy required to understand what a religious organization is. One might further ask if a member of one religious organization in our society has the empathy necessary to master the complexities that are at work in other organizations, even if he has read all the literature. Moberg is obviously very much at home with American Protestant- ism; however, despite a high degree of sophis- tication about the other two major religious groups he does not always seem to be insight- ful when discussing them. Thus his treatment of the fundamentalist-modernist controversy within American Protestantism would appear to this outsider to be excellent, but his discussion of modernism within Catholicism and Judaism strikes one as less than perceptive. In addition, Moberg is occasionally guilty of such factual lapses as equating the Society for the Propagation of the Faith (a fund-raising organization) with groups that are actually engaged in missionary activities, such as the Maryknollers.

These mild reservations should not obscure the fact that The Church as a Social Institu- tion is a major contribution to a rapidly developing branch of sociology.

ANDREW M. GREELEY

National Opinion Research Center University of Chicago

Urban Social Structure. By JAMES M. BESH- ERS. New York: Free Press of Glencoe, Inc., 1962. Pp. ix+207. $5.50.


Article Contentsp.366p.367p.368p.369

Issue Table of ContentsAmerican Journal of Sociology, Vol. 68, No. 3, Studies on Formal Organization (Nov., 1962), pp. 289-406Studies on Formal Organizations: An Editorial Foreword [pp.289-290]Size of Locals and Union Democracy [pp.291-298]Administrative Rationality, Social Setting, and Organizational Development [pp.299-308]Organizations and Output Transactions [pp.309-324]Sources of Resistance to Change in a Mental Hospital [pp.325-334]Organizational Control Structures in Five Correctional Institutions [pp.335-345]Role Strain and the Norm of Reciprocity in Research Organizations [pp.346-354]Careers, Organization Size, and Succession [pp.355-359]Book Reviewsuntitled [p.360]untitled [pp.360-361]untitled [pp.361-362]untitled [pp.362-363]untitled [pp.363-365]untitled [p.365]untitled [pp.365-366]untitled [pp.366-369]untitled [p.369]untitled [pp.369-371]untitled [pp.371-372]untitled [pp.372-373]untitled [pp.373-374]untitled [p.374]untitled [pp.375-376]untitled [p.376]untitled [p.377]untitled [pp.377-380]untitled [p.380]untitled [pp.380-381]untitled [pp.381-382]untitled [pp.382-383]untitled [pp.383-384]untitled [pp.384-385]untitled [pp.385-386]untitled [p.386]untitled [pp.386-388]untitled [pp.388-389]untitled [pp.389-390]untitled [pp.390-391]untitled [p.391]untitled [pp.391-392]untitled [pp.392-393]untitled [pp.393-394]untitled [pp.394-395]untitled [pp.395-396]untitled [pp.396-397]untitled [pp.397-398]untitled [pp.398-399]untitled [pp.399-400]untitled [p.400]

Current Books [pp.401-405]Back Matter [p.406]

review by william caudill - asylums essays on the social situation of mental patients and other...

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