This paper uses English examples to scrutinize the complex interrelations of insanity
and place over the past three centuries, taking as its starting point the late
Erving Goffman’s paper of the same title. From eighteenth-century Bedlam
and the emerging trade in lunacy, through the county asylums and licensed madhouses
of the nineteenth century to the return of the mentally ill to the
‘community’ in the last half of the twentieth century, the place
occupied by insanity has varied sharply, symbolically as well as concretely. These
various techniques of containment and damage limitation must be understood as a
response to the threats, symbolic and practical, that serious mental illness poses
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