On the occasion of the re-publication of Erving Goffman's Relations in Public: Microstudies of the Public Order, including the remarkable appendix, "Insanity of Place," the authors propose new ways of reading Goffman's work in order to highlight his attention to havoc and containment. Goffman's "Insanity of Place," explores the phenomenon of mental illness by asserting that it is an instance of havoc, a symbolic and practical condition that disrupts the social order of life, and one that must be contained. By situating this essay at the center of Goffman's oeuvre they examine Goffman's "philosophy of containment," and trace its trajectory from Asylums, Stigma and "The Insanity of Place" to its full crystallization in Frame Analysis. The authors offer a generative reading of havoc and containment in order to understand the incoherence, irrationality, unreason, incomprehensibility and unbearableness of social life and the imperative to preserve social order from collapsing, dissolving or imploding. This reading enables us to see the cracks in the social order and understand containment as the constant effort exerted to recuperate transgressions and deviations back into that order. Goffman's analysis becomes an opening into engagements with the work of Judith Butler and Michel Foucault around the notion of the normative order and the issues of containment and transgression. Thinking through Goffman's philosophy of containment as the framework for an analysis of socialization, normalization, and social ordering affords an approach to thinking macro-micro linkages of order and instability that confront both our contemporary society and the discipline of sociology.
Theorizing goffman and freud: goffman's inTeracTion order as a social-sTrucTural underpinning for freud's psychoanalyTic self Black hawk hancock roBerTa garner Abstract. A dialectical reading of Goffman and Freud connects the Interaction Order to the psychoanalytic conception of the self and thereby open up new possibilities of interpretation and transformation. Goffman's concept of the Interaction Order enables us to understand more clearly the Freudian concepts of superego, ego-ideal, and the introjected Father. Next, we draw out the dramaturgical approach of both Goffman and Freud in terms of performing self and performing illness and discuss how the psychoanalytic reading of Goffman's work sheds light on the formation of neuroses and the neurotic symptoms which Freud characterized as a type of performance. Here we link Freud's "symptoms" to Goffman's modes of disordered or flawed modes of interaction, specifically hysteria connected to havoc and obsessive compulsive disorder connected to hyperritualization. This dialectical reading allows us to rethink notions of sociality and thereby opens new possibilities for constituting the relation between the self and the social.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.