The book by American sociologist Erwin Goffman “Total Institutions” (1963) is a study of the social processes that lead to changes in the identity of people who find themselves in closed institutions: mental hospitals, prisons, concentration camps, monasteries, army barracks. Based on his own ethnographic work in a psychiatric hospital and numerous additional sources: fiction, memoirs, scientific publications, Goffman paints a three-dimensional picture of the transformations that the self-perception of residents of total institutions undergoes, and the means that residents use to protect themselves from the destructive influence of the institutional environment on their perceptions. about yourself and others. The book “Total Institutions” became an important stage in the understanding of closed institutions not only in the social sciences, but also in society as a whole. For the first time it is completely translated into Russian.