Erving Goffman. Concept of total institutions (PDF)

Seminar paper from the year 2004 in the subject Sociology - Individual, Groups, Society, grade: 1,3, University of Regensburg, language: English, abstract: In view of the current disclosure of torture in war prisons in Iraq, but also through the disclosure of mistreatment in the Brandenburg an der Havel prison, it becomes clear how explosive the concept of total institutions still is more than forty years after its publication by Goffman.

In his work Asyle, first published in 1961, Erving Goffman (1922-1982) summarizes in four essays his many years of sociological studies on the inmates of psychiatric clinics. From 1954 to 1957, Goffman was a visiting professor at the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland. During this time he spent over a year doing field studies at St. Elizabeth's Hospital (Washington D.C.), which then had about 7,000 inmates. Goffman's own experiences in dealing directly with the inmates of St. Elizabeth's Hospital are included in the book as well as countless descriptions of other well-known and lesser-known authors (e.g. George Orwell, Herman Melville), who spent some years of their lives in prison, in the monastery, in the boarding school, in an orphanage, in the military or in similar institutions.

Goffman first encountered the term total institution in a 1952 graduate seminar on institutions. Coined by Everett Hughes, the term must have intrigued Goffman from the start. Burns writes: "It is clear from Goffman's course notes (he gave me a copy of them) that is must have been a remarkable teaching enterprise - enlivened with allusions, encyclopedic in is coverage, and radically critical and innovative in is approach." . But while Goffman thought of the term social institution in a way that differed from Hughes', he adopted the term total institution in Hughes' sense. For Hughes, these were "social institutions which were much more shut off from the outside world" - he cites nunneries as an example - Goffman accordingly relates his observations to "the situation of those 'extruded' from society'.

In this work, the aim is first to present Goffman's concept of total institutions and to go into the points of view of the inmates, the staff and the points of contact of both groups. Subsequently, the concept should be examined and assessed with regard to its possible application and possibilities should be found to further differentiate the concept.