Foucault and Goffman. The Shadow and the Matter of Discipline in the Universe of a Psychiatric Institution

Abstract This paper focuses on the mechanisms of power and discipline that exist within a psychiatric institution in Transylvania, Romania. This is done through combining the theoretical perspectives of Michel Foucault and of Erving Goffman. While Foucault looks at power as the result of internalization through disciplinary mechanisms and discourses, Goffman puts emphasis on the microinteractions and spatial arrangement that shape the institution. By bringing these two lines of thought together, this study tries to construct an analytical tool that reveals how surveillance, normalization and hierarchization operate concomitantly at structural and interpersonal levels. Using qualitative methods, more precisely participant observation, formal and informal interviews, the research explores patients’ daily lives, the dynamics between individuals (be it staff or patient), the regulation of space and the interdependence of written and unwritten rules. It is suggested that institutional power is exercised not only through correction or direct surveillance but also through strategies and those strategies are built around visibility, divestment of space, documentation and collective self-monitoring. This, in turn, generates docile but truncated forms of subjectivity. The study also highlights the continuous existence of disciplinary strategies despite there being ongoing processes of deinstitutionalization, therefore showing how this psychiatric institution creates regulated, individualized and hierarchized existences.