Interaction Ritual by Erving Goffman

Author:Erving Goffman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)
Published: 2017-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

Mental Symptoms And Public Order*

Persons who come to the attention of a psychiatrist typi-cally come to the attention of their lay associates first. What psychiatrists see as mental illness, the lay public usually first sees as offensive behavior—behavior worthy of scorn, hostility and other negative social sanctions. The objective of psychiatry all along has been to interpose a technical perspective: understanding and treatment is to replace retribution; a concern for the interests of the offender is to replace a concern for the social circle he has offended. I refrain from enlarging here on how unfortunate it has been for many offenders to have been granted this medical good fortune.

Freudian psychiatry introduced an important twist in this medical line. In little classics of analysis, Freudians have shown that particular delicts, now called symptoms, can be interpreted or read as part of the offender’s system of communication and defense, in particular a reversion to infantile modes of conduct. The final triumph of this psy-chological, technical perspective is the implication that socially improper behavior can be psychologically normal (as when a man shows strength enough to terminate an unhealthy marital relationship), and a socially proper behavior can be truly sick (as illustrated by the obsessive concerns and sexual withdrawal of some research chemists). In brief, for the psychiatrist, a flagrant presenting symptom is merely a license to start digging.

One effect of this enlightened approach that the sociolo-gist might bewail has been that interest in the improprieties themselves, paradoxically, has been blunted. (After all, a symptom is only a symptom, even if it does mark the place where you start digging. If, through whatever excising, you manage to lop off one symptom, and do nothing about the dynamics, another symptom is likely to pop up; it can have a quite different face and yet wear the same leer.)

In moving so quickly from the social delict to the mental symptom, psychiatrists have tended to fail to be much better than laymen in their assessment of the impropriety of a given act—defensible in the case of extremely deviant acts but not in the case of the many milder misbehaviors. This is inescapable, since we just do not have a technical mapping of the various approved behavior patterns in our society, and what little information we have is not imparted in medical school training. Psychiatrists have failed to provide us with a systematic framework for identifying and describing the type of debet represented by psychotic behavior. At present there is a rather special and hardening language in psychiatry, involving terms such as “flattened affect,” “posturing,” “manneristic movement,” “out of contact/’ and others, which solves the problem of having to write up clinical notes in a hurry but which provides the practitioner with a handful of thumbs. The moralistic language in the social sciences built around the incredible notion that persons should be in good, clear, direct or open communication with one another is, if anything, worse—as if communication were a pill one ought to swallow because it was good for the tummy.

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