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The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life

Asylums. Essays on the Social Situation of Mental patients and Other Inmates

Encounters. Two Studies in the Sociology of Interaction

Goffman E. 1959
The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life

Preface

I mean this report to serve as a sort of handbook detailing one sociological perspective from which social life can be studied, especially the kind of social life that is organized within the physical confines of a building or plant. A set of features will be described which together form a framework that can be applied to any concrete social establishment, be it domestic, industrial, or commercial.

The perspective employed in this report is that of the theatrical performance; the principles derived are dramaturgical ones. I shall consider the way in which the individual in ordinary work situations presents himself and his activity to others, the ways in which he guides and controls the impression they form of him, and the kinds of things he may and may not do while sustaining his performance before them. In using this model I will attempt not to make light of its obvious inadequacies. The stage presents things that are make-believe; presumably life presents things that are real and sometimes not well rehearsed. More important, perhaps, on the stage one player presents himself in the guise of a character to characters projected by other players; the audience constitutes a third party to the interaction - one that is essential and yet, if the stage performance were real, one that would not be there. In real life, the three parties are compressed into two; the part one individual plays is tailored to the parts played by the others present, and yet these others also constitute the audience. Still other inadequacies in this model will be considered later.

1. PERFORMANCES

BELIEF IN THE PART ONE IS PLAYING

When an individual plays a part he implicitly requests his observers to take seriously the impression that is fostered before them. They are asked to believe that the character they see actually possesses the attributes he appears to possess, that the task he performs will have the consequences that are implicitly claimed for it, and that, in general, matters are what they appear to be. In line with this, there is the popular view that the individual offers his performance and puts on his show 'for the benefit of other people'. It will be convenient to begin a consideration of performances by turning the question around and looking at the individual's own belief in the impression of reality that he attempts to engender in those among whom he finds himself.

At one extreme, one finds that the performer can be fully taken in by his own act; he can be sincerely convinced that the impression of reality which he stages is the real reality. When his audience is also convinced in this way about the show he puts on - and this seems to be the typical case - then for the moment at least, only the sociologist or the socially disgruntled will have any doubts about the 'realness' of what is presented.

At the other extreme, we find that the performer may not be taken in at all by his own routine. This possibility is understandable, since no one is in quite as good an observational position to see through the act as the person who puts it on. Coupled with this, the performer may be moved to guide the conviction of his audience only as a means to other ends, having no ultimate concern in the conception that they have of him or of the situation.

When the individual has no belief in his own act and no ultimate concern with the beliefs of his audience, we may call him cynical, reserving the term 'sincere' for individuals who believe in the impression fostered by their own performance. It should be understood that the cynic, with all [page 29] his professional disinvolvement, may obtain unprofessional pleasures from his masquerade, experiencing a kind of gleeful spiritual aggression from the fact that he can toy at will with something his audience must take seriously.1

1. Perhaps the real crime of the confidence man is not that he takes money from his victims but that he robs all of us of the belief that middle-class manners and appearance can be sustained only by middle-class people. A disabused professional can be cynically hostile to the service relation his clients expect him to extend to them; the confidence man is in a position to hold the whole 'legit' world in this contempt.

It is not assumed, of course, that all cynical performers are interested in deluding their audiences for purposes of what is called 'self-interest' or private gain. A cynical individual may delude his audience for what he considers to be their own good, or for the good of the community, etc. For illustrations of this we need not appeal to sadly enlightened showmen such as Marcus Aurelius or Hsun Tzu. We know that in service occupations practitioners who may otherwise be sincere are sometimes forced to delude their customers because their customers show such a heartfelt demand for it. Doctors who are led into giving placebos, filling station attendants who resignedly check and recheck tyre pressures for anxious women motorists, shoe clerks who sell a shoe that fits but tell the customer it is the size she wants to hear - these are cynical performers whose audiences will not allow them to be sincere. Similarly, it seems that sympathetic patients in mental wards will sometimes feign bizarre symptoms so that student nurses will not be subjected to a disappointingly sane performance. 2

2. See Taxel, 'Authority Structure in a Mental Hospital Ward', page 4. Harry Stack Sullivan has suggested that the tact of institutionalized per­formers can operate in the other direction, resulting in a kind of noblesse-oblige sanity. See his 'Socio-Psychiatric Research', American Journal of Psychiatry, x, pages 987-8: 'A study of "social recoveries" in one of our large mental hospitals some years ago taught me that patients were often released from care because they had learned not to manifest symptoms to the environing persons; in other words, had integrated enough of the personal environment to realize the prejudice opposed to their delusions. It seemed almost as if they grew wise enough to be tolerant of the imbecility surrounding them, having finally discovered that it was stupidity and not malice. They could then secure satisfaction from contact with others, while discharging a part of their cravings by psychotic means'.

Goffman E. 1961A
Asylums. Essays on the Social Situation of Mental patients and Other Inmates

Introduction [to the book of four essays] [Penguin pages 11-12 Aldine pages xxi-xxii]

A total institution may be defined as a place of residence and work where a large number of like-situated individuals, cut off from the wider society for an appreciable period of time, together lead an enclosed, formally administered round of life. Prisons serve as a clear example, providing we appreciate that what is prison-like about prisons is found in institutions whose members have broken no laws. This volume deals with total institutions in general and one example, mental hospitals, in particular.

The main focus is on the world of the inmate, not the world of the staff. A chief concern is to develop a sociological version of the structure of the self.
...
The first paper, ' On the Characteristics of Total Institutions, is a general examination of social life in these establishments, drawing heavily on two examples that feature involuntary membership - mental hospitals and prisons. There the schemes developed in detail in the remaining papers are stated and their place in the broader whole suggested.

The second paper, The Moral Career of the Mental Patient, considers the initial effects of institutionalization on the social relationships the individual possessed before he became an inmate.

The third paper, The Underlife of a Public Institution, is concerned with the attachment the inmate is expected to manifest to his iron home and, in detail, with the way in which inmates can introduce some distance between themselves and these expectations.

The final paper, The Medical Model and Mental Hospitalization, turns attention back to the professional staffs to consider, in the case of mental hospitals, the role of the medical perspective in presenting to the inmate the facts of his situation.

Goffman E. 1961A/1
On the Characteristics of Total Institutions [Penguin title page: 13 - Aldine title page: 1]

Introduction

Section 1 - p.15

Social establishments - institutions in the everyday sense of that term - are places such as rooms, suites of rooms, buildings, or plants in which activity of a particular kind regularly goes on.

Section 2 - p.15

Every institution captures something of the time and interest of its members and provides something of a world for them; in brief, every institution has encompassing tendencies. When we review the different institutions in our Western society, we find some that are encompassing to a degree discontinuously greater than the ones next in line. Their encompassing or total character is symbolised by the barrier to social intercourse with the outside and to departure that is often built right into the physical plant, such as locked doors, high walls, barbed wire, cliffs, water, forests, [p.16] or moors. These establishments I am calling total institutions, and it is their general characteristics I want to explore.

The total institutions of our society can be linked in five rough groupings:

* First, there are institutions established to care for persons felt to be both incapable and harmless; these are the homes for the blind, the aged, the orphaned, and the indigent.

* Second, there are places established to care for persons felt to be incapable of looking after themselves and a threat to the community, albeit an unintended one: TB sanitaria, mental hospitals, and leprosaria.

* A third type of total institution is organised to protect the community against what are felt to be intentional dangers to it, with the welfare of the persons thus sequestered not the immediate issue: jails, penitentiaries, P.O.W. camps, and concentration camps.

* Fourth, there are institutions purportedly established the better to pursue some worklike tasks and justifying themselves only on these instrumental grounds: army barracks, ships, boarding schools, work camps, colonial compounds, and large mansions from the point of view of those who live in the servants' quarters.

* Finally, there are those establishments designed as retreats from the world even while often serving also as training stations for the religious; examples are abbeys, monasteries, convents, and other cloisters.

Section 3 - p.17

A basic social arrangement in modern society is that the individual tends to sleep, play and work in different places with different co-participants, under different authorities, and without an over-all rational plan.

The central feature of total institutions can be described as a breakdown of the barriers ordinarily separating these three spheres of life.

* First, all aspects of life are conducted in the same place and under the same central authority.

* Second, each phase of the member's daily activity is carried on in the immediate company of a large batch of others, all of whom are treated alike and required to do the same thing together.

* Third, all phases of the day's activities are tightly scheduled, with one activity leading at prearranged time into the next, the whole sequence of activities being imposed from above by a system of explicit formal rulings and a body of officials.

* Finally, the various enforced activities are brought together into a single rational plan purportedly designed to fulfil the official aims of the institution.

Individually, these features are found in places other than total institutions ... housewives or farm families may have all their major spheres of life within the same fenced-in-area, but these persons are not collectively regimented and do not march through the day's activities in the immediate company of a batch of similar others.

p.18

In total institutions there is a basic split between a large managed group, conveniently called inmates, and a small supervisory staff. Inmates typically live in the institution and have restricted contact with the world outside the walls. The staff often operates on an eight-hour day and is socially integrated into the outside world. Each grouping tends to conceive of the other in terms of narrow hostile stereotypes...
...
p.19: Social mobility between the two strata is grossly restricted; social distance is typically great and often formally prescribed. Even talk across the boundaries may be conducted in a special tone of voice...

The Inmate World

p.24:

2. The recruit comes into the establishment with a conception of himself made possible by certain stable social arrangements in his home world. Upon entrance he is immediately striped of the support provided by these arrangements. In the accurate language of some of our oldest total institutions, he begins a series of abasements, degradations, humiliations, and profanations of self. His self is systematically, if often unintentionally mortified. He begins some radical shifts in his moral career, a career composed of the progressive changes that occur in the beliefs that he has concerning himself and significant others.

Goffman E. 1961A/2
The Moral Career of the Mental Patient [Penguin title page: 117 - Aldine title page: 125]

119

Traditionally the term career has been reserved for those who expect to enjoy the rises laid out within a respectable profession. The term is coming to be used, however, in a broadened sense to refer to any social strand of any person's course through life...

One value of the concept of career is its two-sidedness.

* One side is linked to internal matters held dearly and closely, such as image of self and felt identity;

* the other side concerns official position, jural relations, and style of life, and is part of a publicly accessible institutional complex.

The concept of career, then, allows on to move back and forth between the personal and the public, between the self and its significant society...

[My] main concerns will be with the moral aspects of career - that is, the regular sequence of changes that career entails in the person's self and in his framework of imagery for judging himself and others.

122

The career of the mental patient falls popularly and naturalistically into three main phases: the period prior to entering the hospital, which I shall call the prepatient phase; the period in the hospital, the inpatient phase the period after discharge from the hospital, should this occur, namely the ex-patient phase. [emphasis added] This paper will deal only with the first two phases

{footnote} This simple picture is complicated by the somewhat special experience of roughly a third of ex-patients - namely, readmission to the hospital, this being the recidivist or 'repatient' phase

136

The Inpatient Phase

The last step in the prepatient's career can involve his realisation - justified or not - that he has been deserted by society and turned out of relationships by those closest to him... On entering the hospital, he may very strongly feel the desire not to be known to anyone as a person who could possibly be reduced to these present circumstances, or as a person who conducted himself in the way he did prior to commitment. Consequently,, he may avoid talking to anyone, may stand by himself when possible, and may even be "out of contact" or "manic" so as to avoid ratifying any interaction that presses a politely reciprocal role upon him and opens him up to what he has become in the eyes of others...

137

Once the prepatient begins to settle down, the main outlines of his fate tend to follow those of a whole class of segregated establishments - jails, concentrations camps, monasteries, work campus, and so on - in which the inmate spends the whole round of life on the grounds, and marches through his regimented day in the immediate company of a group of persons of his own institutional status.

154

The moral career of a person of a given social category involves a standard sequence of changes in his way of conceiving of selves, including, importantly, his own. These half-buried lines of development can be followed by studying his moral experiences - that is, happenings which mark a turning point in the way in which the person views the world...
...
Each moral career, and behind this, each self, occurs within the confines of an institutional system, whether a social establishment such as a mental hospital or a complex of personal and professional relationships. The self, then, can be seen as something that resides in the arrangements prevailing in a social system for its members. The self in this sense is not a property of the person to whom it is attributed, but dwells rather in the pattern of social control that is exerted in connection with the person by himself and those around him. This special kind of institutional arrangement does not so much support the self as constitute it.

Goffman E. 1961A/3
The Underlife of a Public Institution: A Study of Ways of Making Out in a Mental Hospital [Penguin title page: 159 - Aldine title page: 171]

159
Part One: Introduction

186
Part Two: Hospital Underlife

267
Part Three: Conclusions

Part One: Introduction

171
Primary and Secondary Adjustments

When an individual cooperatively contributes required activity to an organisation and under required conditions...he is transformed into a cooperator; he becomes the 'normal', 'programmed', or built in member...

I shall speak in these circumstances of the individual having a primary adjustment to the organisation and overlook the fact that it would be just as reasonable to speak of the organisation having a primary adjustment to him.

I have constructed this clumsy term in order to get to a second one, namely secondary adjustments, defining these as any habitual arrangement by which a member of an organisation employs unauthorised means, or obtains unauthorised ends, or both, thus getting around the organisation's assumptions as to what he should do and get and hence what he should be.

180

An interest in the actual places in which secondary adjustments are practised... shifts the focus of attention from the individual to... collective matters. In terms of a formal organisation as a social establishment, the corresponding shift would be from an individual's secondary adjustment to the full set of such adjustments that all memebers of the organisation severally and collectively sustain. These practices together comprise what can be called the underlife of the institution, being to a social establishment what an underworld is to a city.

182

We can begin to look at secondary adjustments - at the practices comprising the underlife of social establishments - by noting that they occur with different frequency and in different forms according to the location of the practitioner in the hierarchy of the organisation.

Part Two: Hospital Underlife

187
Sources

I turn now to consider the sources of materials that patients employ in their secondary adjustments

203
Places

In central Hospital, as in many total institutions, each inmate tended to find his world divided into three parts...

First there was the space that was off-limits or out of bounds...

204
Second, there was surveillance space, the area a patient needed no special excuse for being in, but where he would be subject to the usual authority and restrictions of the establishment...

Finally, there was space ruled by less than usual staff authority...

205
... I shall call these regions free places

206
Sometimes... free places seemed to be employed for no purpose other than to obtain time away from the long arm of the staff and from the crowded noisy wards... All of these places seemed pervaded by a feeling of relaxation and self-determination, in marked contrast to the sense of uneasiness prevailing on some wards. Here one could be ones own man.

Encounters. Two Studies in the Sociology of Interaction

"Role Distance"

In sociology there are few concepts more commonly used than "role," few that are accorded more importance...

Role Concepts

The classic formulation of role concepts comes from the social-anthropological tradition (*) and has led to the development of a conceptual framework sometimes called "role theory."

(*) Principally Ralph Linton, The Study of Man (New York: Appleton-Century, 1936), especially Chapter 8, "Status and Role."

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