The book has an introduction by the Basaglias, and also texts by Erving Goffman, Michel Foucault, Paul Nizan, Luigi Pirandello, Primo Levi, Louis Le Guillant and , Jonathan Swift, Rainer Maria Rilke, Frantz Fanon, Peter Weiss and others.
Foot points out how both the introduction and the text reproduced employ the notion, whether created by Goffman or popularized by him, of the total institution, important in Goffman's 1961 book Asylums, whose Italian translation had been published in 1968.