I stumbled on a new word last week. Lobotomy. It was used as both a noun and a verb. A lobotomy. To be lobotomised. I had to look it up. And what I found felt like an incomplete epitaph, of lives that were never given the chance to be fully inhabited.
In the 1940s and 1950s, a physician named Walter Freeman drove across America in a van he called the “lobotomobile,” performing ice pick lobotomies. It is a procedure in which a metal spike was hammered through the eye socket and into the frontal lobe of thousands of patients. These people were “treated” for depression, for anxiety, for schizophrenia. Others were committed for being difficult. For being inconvenient. And some were subjected to it as a cure for homosexuality.
My horror felt close, nothing like the unsettling but safely distant stance we take toward practices we have long since condemned to history. No. This did not feel distant at all. It felt coldly present, that we are in fact still doing this. Not with metal spikes. Not in hospitals. But it is alive and thriving, the social project of flattening human beings into acceptable and untroubling shapes.
This essay is my attempt to re-write that epitaph and to insist that what was buried was not dead, only forced underground.
It made me think of every LGBTQIA+ person who has been subjected to conversion therapy, not the crude electroshock versions that make for harrowing documentaries, but the quieter, longer, more insidious kind. The kind administered by a parent’s silence, a pastor’s weekly sermon, a community’s cold disapproval. The kind that doesn’t announce itself as therapy at all, but functions as one long, relentless message: who you are is wrong. Make it stop. Make yourself stop. The self goes underground. The feelings get managed away. A kind of living diminishment settles in.
It made me think about the artists, the thinkers, the visionaries who never became who they might have been. The writers who burned their manuscripts. The musicians who chose silence. The leaders whose courage was disciplined out of them before it could fully form. We will never know what we lost. That is perhaps most devastating. The art unmade, the ideas unthought, the movements that never began because the people who would have led them were too busy surviving. Not living.
The lobotomy procedures of the ironically named Freeman were considered successful. The patient’s anguish was declared resolved. Gone. So was almost everything else: the creativity, the desire, the depth of feeling, the spark that makes a person recognizably themselves. Patients became docile. Manageable. Empty. Families sometimes described them as shadows. Present in body, absent in soul.
During my second year in high school, South Africa’s public school education system started undergoing changes that included cut-backs on subsidies. My class group was selecting our core subjects for the following year, many of us enthused to pursue music, drama, art, as preludes to colourful careers we were conjuring. This was not to be.
The school I attended decided to mainstream STEM – science, technology, economics, mathematics – touted as the profitable, sensible, and most efficient career paths to follow. Arts teachers were made redundant, music practice rooms became storage spaces, easels were flung from windows with a haste that could not pause to consider donating them, repurposing them, or even setting them gently down. They were burned.
I was able to take a transfer to another public school, much further away, that managed to spare its speech and drama programme that I happily signed up for. But many of my previous classmates, too many, were forced to dull themselves into conformity. I still think of their talent, what brilliance, what innovative leadership we lost in the burning of those easels.
While this took place at the precipice of South Africa’s end to institutional apartheid, the ice picks of political lobotomy had long been hammered into the decision makers of our time. It maimed and dulled their creative thinking.
Frantz Fanon clearly articulated this, well ahead of his time, as he examined what colonialism does to the interior life of the colonized. He wrote about the psychic damage of being forced into an identity not your own, of having your culture, language, and selfhood treated as pathological. He was writing about the colonial lobotomy long before anyone used that metaphor.
Pathology is indeed quite apt here, not just rhetorically but analytically. A pathology is not merely a bad occurrence. It is a system that has turned against its own host. The immune system attacking the body. The very mechanisms meant to ensure survival becoming the source of destruction.
A society that suppresses its most alive, most generative, most imaginative elements – its queers, its artists, its dissenters, its dreamers – is not protecting itself. It is consuming itself. The conformity that feels like safety is actually a slow diminishment of the collective capacity to adapt, to create, to feel, to survive with any genuine depth. And it is self-reinforcing. The more emotional bluntness a society produces, the less equipped its members are to recognize what has been lost.
You cannot mourn a feeling you have been prevented from having. You cannot defend an inner life you were never permitted to develop. The lobotomized patient does not grieve their own creativity. That is precisely what was taken.
This is why the sociology of deviance was most fascinating to me during my postgraduate studies. I started to understand, and appreciate, that the “deviant” – the homosexual, the bohemian artist, the radical thinker – represents a relationship to desire and interiority that cannot be fully regulated from outside. You cannot legislate what someone truly wants. You cannot audit the inside of an imagination.
Both the queer person and the artist are, in a fundamental sense, answerable to an inner authority. It is our desire, vision, feeling that resists external override. That is what makes us dangerous. It is not the content of what we do so much as the fact that we are oriented inward, toward what the state or institutional religion or the community cannot own or direct. We have, in the deepest sense, a source of authority that competes with the official one.
And yet. There are those who refused to be managed, who bloomed where they were not meant to grow. Gloria Anzaldúa helps us understand what it means to live beyond the cultural, sexual, and psychological borders that others have tried to enforce. Her work Borderlands/La Frontera makes the case that the suppression of fluid identity and the suppression of a creative or spiritual life are the same violence. For her, writing itself was an act of bodily and political survival. Audre Lorde makes the same argument from a different wound: the deep, embodied capacity for feeling and joy is systematically suppressed in women and in oppressed people for exactly this reason. It is a source of genuine power and self-knowledge that no external force can confiscate.
We rightly condemn Walter Freeman. And we should. But let us be honest about why he was able to do what he did, for as long as he did, to as many people as he did. He operated in a culture that was profoundly uncomfortable with human complexity, with grief that didn’t resolve, with desire that didn’t conform, with minds that worked differently. The lobotomy was a solution the culture was waiting for. It answered a question the culture was already asking: how do we make the difficult ones easier to live with?
We are still asking it. We are still answering it. The honest epitaph we owe to the people of those 1940s operating tables is a commitment to stop doing the same procedure with different tools. It is a demand that we build a world capacious enough for the full range of what it means to be human, where passion is not pathologized, where difference is not punished, and the interior life is not a problem to be managed.
The tragedy of the lobotomy was in what was presumed: that a quieter person is a better one. That a life stripped of joy and fire and depth, is preferable to a difficult, luminous, fully-inhabited one.
We have not yet stopped presuming that. And until we do, dare we even claim the right to call ourselves civilized?
Written by Merlin Ince
Marginal Identity 