Stigmatization as mentally ill and involuntary hospitalization
are the means by which we answer these offenses against
propriety.  The individual's persistence in manifesting
symptoms after entering the hospital, and his tendency to
develop additional symptoms during his initial response
to the hospital, can now no longer serve him well as
expressions of disaffection.  From the patient's point of
view, to decline to exchange a word with the staff or
with his fellow patients may be ample evidence of
rejecting the institution's view of what and who he is ;
yet higher management may construe this alienative
expression as just the sort of symptomology the
institution was established to deal with and as the
best kind of evidence that the patient properly belongs
where he now finds himself.  In short, mental hospitalization
outmaneuvers the patient, tending to rob him of the common
expressions through which people hold off the embrace of
organizations -- insolence, silence, sotto voce remarks,
uncooperativeness, malicious destruction of interior
decorations, and so forth : these signs of disaffiliation are
now read as signs of their maker's proper affiliation.

p.306

But when a patient, whose clothes are taken from him each
night, fills his pockets with bits of string and rolled
up paper, and when he fights to keep these possessions
in spite of the consequent inconvenience to those who
must regularly go through his pockets, he is usually seen
as engaging in symptomatic behavior, befitting a very sick
patient, not as someone who is attempting to stand apart from
the place accorded him.

p.307

Obviously, as some of these illustrations imply, removal
activities need not be in themselves illegitimate ; it is
the function that they come to serve for the inmate that
leads us to consider them along with other secondary adjustments.
An extreme here, perhaps, is individual psychotherapy in
state mental hospitals ; this privilege is so rare in
these institutions, and the resulting contact with a staff
psychologist so unique in terms of hospital status structure,
that an inmate can to some degree forget where he is as he
pursues his psychotherapy.  By actually receiving what the
institution formally claims to offer, the patient can succeed
in getting away from what the establishment actually provides.
There is a general implication here.  Perhaps every activity that
an establishment obliges or permits its members to participate
in is a potential threat to the organization, for it would seem
that there is no activity in which the individual cannot become
overengrossed.

p.312

The simplest sociological view of the individual and
his self is that he is to himself what his place in an
organization defines him to be.  When pressed, a sociologist
modifies this model by granting certain complications :
the self may be not yet formed or may exhibit
conflicting dedications.  Perhaps we should further
complicate the construct by elevating these qualifications to
a central place, initially defining the individual, for sociological
purposes, as a stance-taking entity, a something that takes up
a position somewhere between identificaiton with an organization
and opposition to it, and is ready at the slightest pressure to
regain its balance by shifting its involvement to either
direction.  It is thus _against something_ that the self can
emerge.  This has been appreciated by students of totalitarianism ...

I have argued the same case in regard to total institutions.  May
this not be the situation, however, in free society, too?

Without something to belong to, we have no stable self, and yet
total commitment and attachment to any social unit implies a kind
of selflessness.  Our sense of being a person can come from being
drawn into a wider social unit ; our sense of selfhood can arise
through the little ways in which we resist the pull.  Our status is
backed by the solid buildings of the world, while our sense of
personality identity often resides in the cracks.

Goffman _Asylums_ ``The Underlife of a Public Institution'' p.320