The situation of the lobotomized patient

Summary

An attempt was made to describe briefly the main characteristics of the situation of the patient who underwent psychosurgery, that is, the ablation of the frontal cortical area. The writer found the patient discussed here relaxed and fortified when leaving the operating table, but this at the price of being caught in an ahistoric horizontal mode of existence abandoned to the accidental, to the transitory present, which he doesn't refuse to accept any more in the name of the possible. This mode of existence can be defined as a carefree staying with the familiar, as opposed to the Heideggerian care (Sorge) which presupposes the time-structural wholeness of the being-in-the-world, the authentic “stretching-ahead” into the possibilities, the passion for the future, which conveys a meaning to the idea of the past too, making it alive. This restricted time-horizon modifies the patient's fundamental mood in terms of an unauthentic feeling-at-ease, which is supported by the easy accessibility of the things of the everyday. While the new mode of experience, sustained by the liberation of the sensorium, lets things fall into accord by themselves, it is however, at the price of losing the transcendent darkness inherent in the lived moment, which drives the Self beyond itself into the creation of its own history. Anxiety, as existential anxiety, conceived primarily as a stifled restlessness, will be now greatly relieved and many neurotic or eventually psychotic defenses will be rendered unnecessary. Not having the Who in the Now (this Now in which virtually everything is to be found), the essence of becoming is brought here to a solution by a superficial identity of the Ego in its and with its world. The parallel changes in the social sphere were briefly outlined.