Erving Goffman and Modern Sociology by Manning Philip;

Author:Manning, Philip;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley

This view is a concise summary of the findings of both the sociology of mental illness and of Goffman’s own investigations. According to this largely sociological view, to say that a person is mentally ill is to speak metaphorically: it implies that because no one is really sure what mental illness is, the illness designation is only a temporary classification. Perhaps a great deal of the behavior that is now diagnosed as mental illness will one day be shown to be an illness with identifiable neurological and physiological characteristics; perhaps some of the behavior will be shown to be symptomatic of mental illness; perhaps only very little.

Goffman and Szasz are both very skeptical about the medical and scientific claims of psychiatrists. Goffman signaled this in the preface to Asylums, noting ironically that, unlike many patients, he began fieldwork “with no great respect for the discipline of psychiatry nor for agencies content with its current practice” (1961a: 8). At the end of the preface, however, he acknowledged that many psychiatrists had been fair-minded about his research. As evidence of the fair-mindedness of psychiatry, it is interesting to note that Asylums is now often referred to in psychiatry textbooks as an important study of the unintended consequences of the institutionalization of the mentally ill.

Szasz’s mission is to make people aware of what he sees as the limited competence of the psychiatric profession. From his perspective, psychiatrists have failed to recognize that their claim that mental illness is a physical illness is a metaphorical and not a literal suggestion. The mistakes of the psychiatric profession derive from their failure to distinguish the metaphorical from the literal.

Goffman’s mission was not specifically to debunk psychiatry: instead he wanted to use the findings of psychiatry in a new way. If Szasz is right to say that mental illness is about rule-breaking and not about physical abnormality, then the “antics” of the mentally ill should tell us a lot about normal, mundane, routine behavior. To put the matter crudely: Goffman thought that even though psychiatrists may not be very good at psychiatry, they may nevertheless be excellent sociologists. This is because psychiatrists have had to learn a sociological sensitivity concerning ordinary behavior; they have had to observe the behavior of normal people very carefully in order to distinguish it from the behavior of their patients. Goffman gave this view in the early paper, “Mental Symptoms and Public Order” (1964, reprinted in Goffman, 1967):

Psychosis is something that can manifest itself to anyone in the patient’s work place, in his neighborhood, and his household, and must be seen, initially at least, as an infraction of the social order that obtains in these places. The other side of the study of symptoms is the study of public order, the study of behavior in public and semipublic places. If you would learn about one side of this matter, you ought to study the other too. (1967: 139–40)

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