By Erving Goffman
“Asylums is an analysis of life in “total institutions”—closed worlds like prisons, army training camps, naval vessels, boarding schools, monasteries, and old folks’ homes—where the inmates are regimented, surrounded by other inmates, and unable to leave the premises. It describes what these institutions make of the inmate, and what he can make of life inside them. Special attention is focused on mental hospitals, drawing on the author’s year of field work in a large American institution. It is the thesis of this book that the most important facto." in forming a mental-hospital patient is his institution, not his illness, and that his reactions and adjustments are those of inmates in other types of total institutions as well.”
NY. Anchor Books. 1961. 382p.