Spannungsherde

In 1935 a Portuguese neurologist developed the lobotomy. The operation was intended to alleviate severe mental disorders, but met with harsh criticism from experts. It broke a taboo because it directly intervened in the brain and changed the personality of the patients. After the end of the Second World War, however, the procedure became widely accepted. As the number of psychosurgical interventions increased rapidly, new opportunities opened up for research. It was now said that lobotomy relieved the 'affective tension' of the mentally ill, even in 'hopeless cases', and relieved the burden on society as well as on institutional psychiatry. Although experts were increasingly sceptical about the method as early as the 1950s, the era of the lobotomy only came to an end when psychiatry increasingly came under the crossfire of public criticism around 1970. Marietta Meier examines the story.