[Dean's World] Celia Farber: The Lobotomist

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Posted by Celia Farber:
The Lobotomist
http://www.deanesmay.com/posts/1201415561.shtml


   I went out of my way, last Monday, to watch the PBS special "The
   Lobotomist" about Dr. Walter Freeman, the "genius" who pioneered first
   the lobotomy and then the "transorbital lobotomy." It was a harrowing
   hour of film--fascinating, devastating, very well handled.

   And that was what bothered me about the film: How well handled it was.
   Great pains were taken to strap the viewer into the sophisticated
   denialism that insists Dr. Freeman was a complex "genius," who "really
   wanted to help people" (the severely mentally ill)....by quite
   literally jamming an icepick-like instrument above their eyeballs to
   cut the nerves between the eyes and the brain. He performed tens of
   thousands of these--and he wasn't even a surgeon. He performed them
   right out in the corridors of the mental wards, to helpless patients
   on cots, whose families had signed them up for the new Miracle Cure.
   Freeman's son revealed that he took the first icepick right out of the
   family freezer.

   It didn't even stop when he destroyed one of the Kennedy girls, who is
   described as one of his most catastrophic cases. She was a perfectly
   healthy young woman, accused of "acting out," -- of being too forward,
   impulsive, possibly sexual. Ah now here's a girl who had a father. Her
   father Joe Kennedy was worried she might "catch a venereal disease."
   So he called the famous Dr. Freeman who promptly gored her brain
   through her eyeballs. Well...it did fix the girl. She certainly never
   flirted, or danced provocatively again. She became a complete
   vegetable--consigned to a home for the rest of her life.

   Many patients died instantly when Freeman "operated" on them with his
   icepick. And the good doctor would just keep walking down the corridor
   and do the next one. Some days he performed over a hundred
   transorbital lobotomies in one day.

   And they all loved him; The Lobotomist, (who of course went to an Ivy
   League college, as did all his forefathers,) was raved about in the
   New York Times , Washingtom Post, all through the respectable media.
   He was decorated with every medical honor. He was at one point the
   head of the AMA. And, quite embarrassingly...he received the Nobel
   Prize in Medicine for his revolutionary cure for insanity.

   Not only was he clearly insane, but he drew an entire culture along
   with him, into a literal bloodbath that was hailed as a breakthrough
   in medicine. And then when the madness subsided, when too many
   patients died, when people started to get queasy, when Thorazine ("the
   chemical lobotomy") seized the marketplace, when the craze was over,
   they wasted him of course. Skapegoated and abjected him so they didn't
   get themselves stained with the whole unfortnate matter. And Freeman,
   of course, became desperate to regain his lost glory. He traveled the
   country in a car he called a "lobotomobile" to try to track down his
   former patients to see how they had fared--to prove he has been right
   all along.

   The film leans heavily on the notion of the tragic genius who meant
   well and who had a burning vision to be great, to help patients...and
   so forth...but I bristled at this. There were too many interviews with
   sons, admirers, even a daughter of a woman who'd been lobotomized who
   said it really did make her mother "better."

   You can see the heads of Journalism Departments applauding the film's
   "balance."

   But what you don't quite hear in the film is a scream, a human cry.

   I urge you to go to the PBS website and see if it possible to watch
   the entire film, or order it.

   And I have a very serious question: Watch this film and then please,
   explain to me, why is everybody lambasting and mocking Tom Cruise for
   saying that psychiatry is dark?