In today’s workshop we listened to ‘My Lobotomy’: Howard Dully’s Journey

By far the best part of this workshop was watching Liam squirm every time they explained the process of an ice-pick going through someone’s eye. But to be fair, it was pretty confronting. I actually never legitimately gave faith to the fact that people were really lobotomised, that it was legal, and basically just how f*ing messed up it is. For those reading, a transorbital lobotomy (the kind of lobotomy that they’re discussing in the podcast) was a practice done in the middle 20th century. It was a form of brain surgery, where an ice-pick was forced through the eye socket to pierce the frontal lobe. This practice basically “mixed around” brain tissue, changing the person’s personality traits and brain chemistry (Sort of like Phineas Gage’s case) and was done to treat people with mental illness. It’s absolutely crazy.

This podcast was some what meloncholic, and displayed a lot of grief from people involved in Walter Freeman’s experiments but eventually ended with Howard seeking closure and forgiving his father for ever allowing his lobotomy to take place. The entire thing was very wholesome and somewhat satisfying despite how gross the idea of lobotomy actually is.

Immediately though, while listening to the podcast I could only think of a movie I’ve seen a hundred times; Shutter Island.

This was the first real representation of lobotomy I’ve ever seen in media, and it happens to be set in the 1950s precisely when these sort of experiments were taking place. To make matters worse, the lobotomies in the movie were experiments done in secret on mental patients at an abandoned lighthouse on an island that was a large-scale jail for the criminally insane. Scary stuff.

The movie plays on the entire idea of lobotomy – the fact that those who have undergone a lobotomy often don’t remember the procedure suggests that the main protagonist has just had mind-altering surgery and has in fact been crazy all along. And the fact that mentally stable people may be forced into insane asylums, or into having a lobotomy despite being completely sane – the act of lobotomy then alters their mind to a point where they may in fact be insane afterwards. Therefore, anyone’s crazy in the lobotomy game – it’s merely a tool to control people which is exactly what is demonstrated as Freeman’s main motive as a ‘crazy scientist’ in My Lobotomy.