Asylums

This chapter provides a series of historically informed reflections on the vicissitudes of the term ‘asylum’. The concept has, it turns out, undergone striking changes in meaning over the course of the past two centuries. Originally associated at the outset of the nineteenth-century lunacy reform movement with Utopian visions of institutions that would serve as humane and creative retreats, to which the mad would repair for rehabilitation, the concept acquired darker overtones in the Victorian age, as initial expectations met with disappointment, and what were intended as philanthropic foundations degenerated into more or less welltended cemeteries for the still breathing. In the second half of our own century, such ‘loony bins’ have come under sustained ideological assault, and the once positive associations of the term asylum have been transformed, via the writing of the sociologist Erving Goffman and others, into something with sinister overtones of the concentration camp. Most recently of all, however, the failure of community neglect masquerading as community care has created renewed interest in the relevance of the more positive meanings that can be attached to the notion of ‘asylum’.