Compare Foucault’s Treatment of the Insane with that of Goffman’s on Asylums

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Recommended: Stigma of madness in the nineteenth century

When reading the works of both Michel Foucault and Erving Goffman, together they give a delineation of the discourse of madness. This essay delves into both of these renowned sociologists, in an attempt to explore both Michel Foucault’s finding on the treatment of the insane and Erving Goffman’s work on asylums.
It begins with a very deep and archival aspect on Foucault’s part; where close attention was paid to the evolution of language, words and the view of the mad. Foucault studied and researched in a more genealogical and archeological perspective, as he looked at the mad from inception. He focused on society as a whole and saw madness at the macro level, thereby researching society’s changing views and the interactions and treatments the patients received from the administration of these mental hospitals.
Foucault as a post structuralist was very interested and invested in studying society, more specifically the constant changing of knowledge and how society as a whole viewed other individuals within that society. This was done by grouping these individuals into unsavory categories; these categories were developed based on the acts or ideas of these individuals which were seen as being against the “norm”. Within the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, these categories of people were comprised of the prostitutes, vagabonds, beggars, criminals and the mad; they were confined to institutions all across Europe.
With this “Great Confinement,” Foucault looked closely at the distinctions which were developed to distinguish between madness and sanity within the Age of Reason. He debunked these distinctions in more detail in his paper “Madness and Unreason: History of Madness in the Classical Age” (Foucault, 1961) After acquiring ...

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...on to major contemporary social theorists (2003): 34.
Goffman, Erving. Asylums: Essays on the social situation of mental patients and other inmates. Aldine Transaction, 1968.
Goulding, Christina. "Grounded theory, ethnography and phenomenology: A comparative analysis of three qualitative strategies for marketing research."European journal of Marketing 39, no. 3/4 (2005): 294-308.
Haralambos, Michael and Martin Holborn.Sociology: Themes and Perspectives. Harper Collins, 2010“

Madness ,the Absence of Work” . Foucault Michel , Stastny Peter , SengelDeniz ,1995
University of Chicago Press , Vol.21; no2.

Weinstein, Raymond M. "Goffman’s asylums and the social situation of mental patients." Orthomolecular Psychiatry 11, no. 4 (1982): 267-274.
"Michel Foucault - Biography." Michel Foucault. http://www.egs.edu/library/michel-foucault/biography/ (accessed March 28, 2014).

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