American Studies Commons^™

What Killed Mcmurphy, Roger A. Lohmann

Faculty & Staff Scholarship

Despite the generally optimistic and hopeful tone of organizational goals and public policy, the general record of residential treatment institutions, or asylums, and of efforts to reform them have been equally unsuccessful. In this paper, it is argued that the lack of success in basic institutional reform over much of the past two centuries is, itself, a part of the tragic cycle of institutionalization. A principle factor in the failure of reforms (the tragic flaw, as it were) is the naive rationalism, which forms the psychological and sociological basis of the dominant model of institutional life used by institutional officials …