lobotomy

plural lobotomies

1. historicalmedicineA surgical operation involving cutting into a lobe of a body organ, specifically (neurosurgery), a procedure, now largely disused, involving severing connections between the prefrontal cortex and the thalamic region of the frontal lobe of the brain to treat certain mental illnesses.

   Old psychiatric hospitals are even more frightening. They existed at a time in history when shock therapy, brain tissue manipulation, implants, drug experimentation and lobotomies were treatments de jour.

   2007 April, Julie Albrecht Royce, “Ghosts and Monsters of Lake Michigan—Haunting and Stalking the Sunset Coast”, in Traveling Michigan’s Sunset Coast: Exploring Michigan’s West Coat Beach Towns from New Buffalo to Mackinaw City, Holt, Mich.: Thunder Bay Press, →ISBN, part 2, page 420

   Synonyms: leucotomy

   1. historicalmedicineAn operation involving the severing of the sympathetic nerve trunk.

      Synonyms: leucotomy

2. figurativelyAn act of removing or separating, and often disregarding or forgetting, something.

   Put another way, how can we avoid an ethical lobotomy in establishing an organizational perspective?

   2002 October, Ron Elsdon, “The Central Dilemma”, in Affiliation in the Workplace: Value Creation in the New Organization, Westport, Conn.: Praeger Publishers, Greenwood Publishing Group, →ISBN, part I (Framing the Environment and Issues), page 21

   4 more examples

   As [Anthony] Magistrale has noted, evil in the fiction of Stephen King "can establish dominion only at the expense of the individual's moral conscience". Yet this conscience is a deep part of the soul; to silence it, characters must perform a kind of moral lobotomy, excising the best parts of themselves, until what is left becomes less than human.

   1992, Bernadette Lynn Bosky, “Choice, Sacrifice, Destiny, and Nature in The Stand”, in Anthony Magistrale, editor, A Casebook on The Stand (Studies in Literary Criticism; 38), Mercer Island, Wash.: Starmont House, →ISBN, page 135

   Organisations which set out to treat all individuals as the same, or are 'colour-blind' in their philosophy, could be said to impose a form of cultural lobotomy on their clients, in denying the additional skills, knowledge and experience that they have as members of a minority culture.

   1998, Frans Meijers, Carrie Piggott, “Careers Guidance and Ethnic Minorities in Holland and Britain: Confronting Fear and Anger”, in Megan Crawford, Richard Edwards, Lesley Kidd, editors, Taking Issue: Debates in Guidance and Counselling in Learning, London; New York, N.Y.: Routledge, →ISBN, part I (Ethics and Equity), page 51

   We hear a great deal about the need to cultivate civic virtue and a heightened sense of obligation, but rarely—if ever—are skepticism, conscientiousness, and intellectual honesty included among the list of virtues presented by those who would renew public life. It is as if civic engagement required a moral-intellectual lobotomy, the better to overcome doubts about the inherent goodness of the community, the moral worth of a given group identity, or the value of specific ideological commitment.

   2001, Dana Villa, “Conclusion”, in Socratic Citizenship, Princeton, N.J.; Woodstock, Oxfordshire: Princeton University Press, →ISBN, page 302

   In the end, as Levinson feared, the price of Charlie being accepted into normative school society is a kind of social lobotomy: he is tamed, so he is not really Charlie anymore.

   2018 January, David Resnick, “Civic Education”, in Representing Education in Film: How Hollywood Portrays Educational Thought, Settings, and Issues, New York, N.Y.: Palgrave Macmillan, →DOI, →ISBN, part II (A Movie Close-up on Educational Themes), page 13