The Sociology of the Mentally Disordered Offender by Tom Mason Dave Mercer

Author:Tom Mason, Dave Mercer [Tom Mason, Dave Mercer]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Criminology, Sociology, General
ISBN: 9781317882794
Google: 2_7JAwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2014-06-11T04:59:42+00:00

Creation of the asylum

The word asylum, in its original meaning, connotes a state of affairs in which a person takes shelter, seeks refuge, or claims sanctuary from some form of political, religious, economic, or psychological persecution. A preferable place of inviolable relief standing apart from another place of perpetual torment. However, latterly this noun has taken on the harsher semantic of a total institution from an anachronistic ideology, a place for society's unwanted (Goffman, 1962). A 'bin' for refuse rather than a place of refuge. This changing semantic emanates from, and is rooted in, the historical discourse pertaining to the mad and bad throughout the ages. According to Foucault (1961) the discourse on Western madness has known four distinct phases. In Medieval times it was regarded as a divination, a holy possession, a spiritual madness or badness, whereas in the Renaissance it was closely identified with a form of high wisdom, ironical reason, a sublime folly. Then, madness was no longer feared as a condition, but merely mocked the world to reveal it for what it was - another form of non-sense. Madness pointed to a meaning beyond reason, which created a new terror for society. This terror producing the expulsion of the insane from its bosom, symbolically on the 'Ship of Fools' the 'loonies' were sent away. Quite suddenly, in the mid seventeenth century madness ceased to be allowed its freedom and became a fixed entity for 'scientific' scrutiny and professional development. The symbolic ship had anchored and turned into the abysmal hospital (Foucault, 1961).

Foucault claims that

at the end of the Middle Ages, leprosy disappeared from the Western world. In the margins of the community, at the gates of cities, there stretched wastelands which sickness had ceased to haunt but had left sterile and long uninhabitable. For centuries, these reaches would belong to the non-human. From the fourteenth to the seventeenth century, they would wait, soliciting with strange incantations a new incarnation of disease, another grimace of terror, renewed rites of purification and exclusion... Leprosy withdrew, leaving derelict these low places and these rites which were intended, not to suppress it, but to keep it at a sacred distance, to fix it in an inverse exaltation. What doubtless remained longer than leprosy, and would persist when the lazar houses had been empty for years, were the values and images attached to the figure of the leper as well as the meaning of his exclusion, the social importance of that insistent and fearful figure which was not driven off without first being inscribed within a sacred circle.

(Foucault, 1961)

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