Psychosurgery: Carte Blanche?

Dougherty, Frank I.

doi:10.2307/3961609

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“…Protestors believed psychosurgery rested on an offensive, unsound foundation. “The biology of violence-propensity,” they declared to be myth, not science, akin to the discredited criminal anthropology of Cesare Lombroso (Coleman 1974, 681; Dougherty 1977; see also Gibson 2002; Horn 2003). 50 According to this critique, the category of “violence-prone” is a fiction not unlike the nineteenth-century illness “drapetomania,” that explained slaves’ compulsion to escape.…”

Section: Condemnations Of Psychosurgerymentioning

confidence: 99%

The Surgical Elimination of Violence? Conflicting Attitudes towards Technology and Science during the Psychosurgery Controversy of the 1970s

Casey¹

2015

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In the 1970s a public controversy erupted over the proposed use of brain operations to curtail violent behavior. Civil libertarians, civil rights and community activists, leaders of the anti-psychiatry movement, and some U.S. Congressmen charged psychosurgeons and the National Institute of Mental Health, with furthering a political project: the suppression of dissent. Several government-sponsored investigations into psychosurgery rebutted this charge and led to an official qualified endorsement of the practice while calling attention to the need for more "scientific" understanding and better ethical safeguards. This paper argues that the psychosurgery debate of the 1970s was more than a power struggle between members of the public and the psychiatric establishment. The debate represented a clash between a postmodern skepticism about science and renewed focus on ultimate ends, on the one hand, and a modern faith in standards and procedures, a preoccupation with means, on the other. These diverging commitments made the dispute ultimately irresolvable.

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Section: Condemnations Of Psychosurgerymentioning

confidence: 99%

The Surgical Elimination of Violence? Conflicting Attitudes towards Technology and Science during the Psychosurgery Controversy of the 1970s

Casey¹

2015

Sci Context

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

Psychosurgery: Carte Blanche?

Cited by 1 publication

References 0 publications

The Surgical Elimination of Violence? Conflicting Attitudes towards Technology and Science during the Psychosurgery Controversy of the 1970s

The Surgical Elimination of Violence? Conflicting Attitudes towards Technology and Science during the Psychosurgery Controversy of the 1970s

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