ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author presents some of the perspectives that guided his study that entails an investigation of psychiatric philosophies and of their associated daily practice as he observed it in two hospitals. It claims that different psychiatrists have quite different conceptions of the core, the most characteristic activity, of their professional lives. The chapter outlines the considerations that led the author to focus on psychiatric ideologies as they were expressed in hospital settings. That focus quickly led to a conception of the hospital that is different from the two principal conceptions dominating hospital studies and discussions of hospital administration. The rational and efficient model is based on the assumption that a hospital is organized for specific purposes and that the institution's performance is judged in relation to those purposes. Large state psychiatric hospitals were the characteristic form of institutional mental treatment during the nineteenth century.
