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The Insanity of Place

University of California, San Diego

This paper uses English examples to scrutinize the complex interrelations of insanity and place over the past three centuries, taking as its starting point the late Erving Goffman’s paper of the same title. From eighteenth-century Bedlam and the emerging trade in lunacy, through the county asylums and licensed madhouses of the nineteenth century to the return of the mentally ill to the ‘community’ in the last half of the twentieth century, the place occupied by insanity has varied sharply, symbolically as well as concretely. These various techniques of containment and damage limitation must be understood as a response to the threats, symbolic and practical, that serious mental illness poses to the social order, at both the micro and macroscopic levels of analysis.

Key Words: Goffman • insanity • spatial arrangements • social order

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