Sounds of Sympathy – The Consolation of Howard Dully

On Jan. 17, 1946, a psychiatrist named Walter Freeman launched a radical new era in the treatment of mental illness in this country. On that day, he performed the first-ever transorbital or “ice-pick” lobotomy in his Washington, D.C., office…

Before this weeks workshop I knew what a transorbital lobotomy was.

I also knew who Walter Freeman was.

In fact, I was quite radically more informed about the history of the entire procedure than many in my class, but my education was missing a key element.

That element was Howard Dully.

…One of Freeman’s youngest patients is today a 56-year-old bus driver living in California. Over the past two years, Howard Dully has embarked on a quest to discover the story behind the procedure he received as a 12-year-old boy…

The lights dimmed and I lay on the floor, pulling down my shirt and its sleeves so I didn’t come into contact with the rough carpet. I closed my eyes and steadied my breathing, ready to leave the space I currently occupied for another. As someone who was only just introducing herself to the production of sonic narratives I wanted my entire attention solely occupied by the soundscape we were entering. The moment ‘ice-pick’ was mentioned I knew what we were in for, however when the rotation of narrators came to a close Howard Dully’s deep voice diverged the path of the story from that of Walter Freeman to his own experience of his lobotomy.

“Until this moment I haven’t shared this fact with anyone except my wife and a few close friends… now I’m sharing it with you.”

His voice, though somewhat monotone was not lacking in emotion. Slowly he divulges to us his fear of asking his family about his lobotomy and a self assurance that there was something not quite right about him. That there was something missing that was fundamentally supposed to be there. This fear is what drives the podcast as he seeks out others who have been lobotomised, finally confronting his father about his lobotomy.

The path of the story was far from what I had expected. My experiences of records surrounding the transorbital lobotomy were gruesome and clinical, directed at a doctor who many considered to be a monster for what he did to some 2,500 patients across America. What I got here however was something incredibly human and, surprisingly, relatable. Dully’s fear of isolation and divergence, the overwhelming sense that he lost something crucial to his existence: these are things that we can all sympathise with, because we have all felt them.

“I’ve always felt different; wondered if something was missing from my soul”

Dully’s story is an expose of our constant fear of each other. Our constant fear of both being different and experiencing those who differ from us. The lobotomy was a response to everything from severe mental disorders to quirks of personality and his personal account explored how human interaction is tainted by misunderstanding. As someone who has suffered from mental illness my emotional response to stories of lobotomy were always sympathetic, but from a point of possibly being the subject of such a procedure, where I living in America in the 1950s. My sympathy for Dully came in the form of simply feeling different, and wondering what I might be were I not to suffer a mental condition. I understand the uncertainty as to what is illness and what is identity.

Sound, I thought, brought Howard Dully’s story out of the procedure from whence it was born and into the realm of the human condition. Sound cut away judgement and pretence. It was more intimate than watching Howard Dully. He was closer than a screen could ever be. The lack of visuals meant that we knew there was information we didn’t have about him, just the way there was information he didn’t have about himself. He felt less foreign, less unfamiliar. He felt incredibly human and vulnerable; vulnerable, in an utterly human way.

“It does wonders to know that other people have the same pain.”

Hearing Howard Dully’s journey was far more endearing than seeing it and it made me realise that narratives exist outside of both visual and auditory bounds. We put them in those categories when we wish to share them with each other and that decision has to come out of sentiments of necessity not baseless aestheticism. Dully’s journey wasn’t a visual one because visuals would have served it no purpose. So, as the lights came back on and I pulled myself begrudgingly off the floor and back to my seat, I realised that that was a process my narratives would also have to go through. I could not continue to simply rely on my skills to fit a narrative within whatever medium I could harness. I would need to fit my medium to the narrative I desired to share if I ever wished to do them justice just as Piya Kochhar and Dave Isay did justice to Howard Dully’s.