Animaladies

Gender, Animals, and Madness

Lori Gruen, Fiona Probyn-Rapsey, Lori Gruen, Fiona Probyn-Rapsey

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781501342165
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory
• Index: Literature

Do depictions of crazy cat ladies obscure more sinister structural violence against animals hoarded in factory farms? Highlighting the frequent pathologization of animal lovers and animal rights activists, this book examines how the "madness" of our relationships with animals intersects with the "madness" of taking animals seriously. The essays collected in this volume argue that "animaladies" are expressive of political and psychological discontent, and the characterization of animal advocacy as mad or "crazy" distracts attention from broader social unease regarding human exploitation of animal life. While allusions to madness are both subtle and overt, they are also very often gendered, thought to be overly sentimental with an added sense that emotions are being directed at the wrong species. Animaladies are obstacles for the political uptake of interest in animal issues-as the intersections between this volume and established feminist scholarship show, the fear of being labeled unreasonable or mad still has political currency.

Part I

DISMEMBER

Chapter 1

JUST SAY NO TO LOBOTOMY

Lori Gruen

The case of lobotomy, despite its extremity, provides a poignant illustration of the precarity or threat of affect (or emotion or sentiment or care) in our relationships with each other and other animals. In this chapter, I will explore the ways “affect” has been understood, the way it has been feminized, rejected, and policed, and interrogate attempts to have it removed from our discourse and theory, from our activism, even from our brains! These efforts are inevitably unsuccessful, but the impact of the rejection of affect has nonetheless been intense and I think it has hindered collective efforts at making the world better for animals, or at least less horrible. Indeed, we are not able to fully be in meaningful relationships when a big part of our cognitive/affective capacity is cut off, even if it’s not technically “cut out.”

I will first discuss this scientific malady of remarkable proportions, the lobotomy, and then I will turn to an analysis of the rejection of affect, and finally I will revisit the sort of affect I have been advocating, what I call entangled empathy (Gruen 2015), which resists the division between reason and emotion and seeks to not just enhance our pursuit of justice but provide us with meaningful, caring “crazy”—in the sense of counter-normative, excessive ways to enrich our relationships in that pursuit.¹

Lobotomies

Walter Freeman was an “overzealous” showman who traveled the United States performing and promoting lobotomies. He is reported to have performed over 2,500 lobotomies on patients from twenty-three states. His first patient, in 1936, was a housewife from Kansas, the first of many more housewives who had parts of their brains ablated. Another housewife, a 29-year-old, was the first to receive the transorbital lobotomy. His last lobotomy was performed on another housewife, Helen Mortensen, who was subjected to her third lobotomy and died from a brain hemorrhage. That was in February 1967 and it was after her death that Freeman was banned from operating.²

In 2005, National Public Radio in the United States did a story on one of the youngest people to have a lobotomy, Howard Dully, who was just twelve years old (NPR 2005). The story is shocking, and Dully (with Charles Fleming) wrote a riveting memoir about his experience (2008). The NPR story included a few oral histories, one was from a housewife, Patricia, who seemed glad to have had a lobotomy as she was suffering from depression. Her husband had arranged for her to have the lobotomy and apparently this interview was the first they had talked about it (the lobotomy was in 1962—forty-three years earlier). In that interview Patricia says she doesn’t remember anything at all about it and Glenn says, “We were coming back from San Jose, following the operation, and Pat informed me that she couldn’t wait to get home because she wanted to go down and file for divorce.” Patricia responds, “Hmmm … Don’t remember that at all. I don’t think I said it.” Glenn says, “I think I just went on driving and ignored the situation and began to wonder to myself, ‘How much good did this operation accomplish?’ Really, I can see no changes in most areas except she’s much easier to get along with.” Pat says, “I was a more free person after I’d had it. Just not to be so concerned about things … I just, I went home and started living, I guess is the best I can say—just started living again and was able to get back into taking care of things and cooking and shopping and that kind of thing.”

The idea of altering the brain in order to facilitate social compliance and eliminate undesirable behavior has an interesting history. Surgical interventions reached their heyday in the 1940s as mental asylums were brimming over with cases after the Second World War. In that decade alone, more than 18,000 lobotomies were performed in the United States and tens of thousands more in other countries.

In “Psychosurgery: Intelligence, Emotion and Social Behavior Following Prefrontal Lobotomy for Mental Disorders,” Freeman wrote:

[T]he frontal lobes are essential for satisfactory social adaptation … certain individuals may suffer from perverted activity of these areas and may become capable of better adaptation when these lobes are partially inactivated … Partial separation of the frontal lobes from the rest of the brain resulted in reduction of disagreeable self-consciousness, abolition of obsessive thinking, and satisfaction with performance, even though the performance is inferior in quality. The emotional nucleus of the psychosis is removed, the sting of the disorder, is drawn. (1942, vii)

He goes on to describe the history of surgical intervention in mental disorder, since female genitalia were often thought to be the site of the disorder. He noted that

surgeons began searching about here and there for offending organs that were supposed to be causing mental disorder. The first attack … was upon the internal genitalia, particularly the ovaries, because of the notion that functional nervous disorders were produced by the wanderings of the uterus into various parts of the body … After several years of experimentation and the sacrifice of many thousands of ovaries, the conclusion was reached that castration in the female, while sometimes exercising a temporarily beneficial effect, was not the solution to the problem of mental disorder. On the contrary, it frequently brought in its wake a train of undesirable symptoms that increased the discontent and often the misbehavior of the sufferer. (1942, 5)

In the early days of medicine, when all sorts of different theories were floated about the causes of illness, it was not uncommon to think that they were due, in some way, to “a depraved state of the humors” which was usually the fault of the sufferer. Thomas Sydenham, a well-known seventeenth-century British physician, noted that female hysteria was the second most common disease, just behind fevers. He attributed the malady to “irregular motions of the animal spirits,” which were caused by “some great commotion of mind, occasioned by some sudden fit, either of anger, grief, terror or like passions.”³

Two hundred years later, it’s only slightly surprising that women were the most common patients—and even today, women suffer more mental disturbances than men. A short piece in Psychology Today reports that even though it may be simple to attribute the “epidemic of mental illness among women” to hormones, or the idea that women are more emotional, “The truth, though, is that psychiatrists aren’t really sure why mental illness is more common among women” (Young 2015). Perhaps the reason this remains mysterious is because there still are more men than women asking the question.

One male psychiatrist, Gottlieb Burckhardt, was the first person on record to perform a surgical procedure to relieve the commotion of the mind. Burckhardt was a superintendent at a small Swiss mental hospital, and in 1888 he was the first to experiment with removing or destroying parts of the brain to address “perverted” problems of the mind. He experimented on six people. His work was later criticized because he was unaware of brain functionality and, in fact, was not trained as a surgeon. One of the patients died five days after the operation from epileptic convulsions, one “improved” but later committed suicide, another two showed no change, and the last two patients became “quieter.”

About fifty years later, brain surgery for behavioral maladies got going again after a paper presented at a neurological conference in London renewed excitement about surgical intervention for mental disorder. At that conference, John Fulton and his graduate student Carlyle Jacobsen from Yale reported on an experiment they performed on two young chimpanzees, Lucy and Becky. The use of chimpanzees in the history of lobotomies is often overlooked, but when it is mentioned, it is usually just these two chimpanzees that are noted. The full impact of Fulton’s research on chimpanzees is largely absent. Indeed, at the conference, Fulton and Jacobsen only mentioned the two young chimpanzees who survived the procedure. Ross, another young chimpanzee, died of dysentery while in Fulton’s lab. Infant chimpanzee Lu died from meningitis following frontal lobe extirpation. She was involved, with Lucy, Becky, and another chimpanzee, Jerry, in Fulton’s laboratory where they were trying “to create a group or colony of experimental defectives” (R.M.Yerkes Papers). Jerry died following an experimental operation, Lucy was killed and her brain prepared for study. An annual report from the lab in 1937 states that “Becky will be sacrificed within a few months” (R.M. Yerkes Papers).

At the London Conference, in their report to the attendees, Fulton and Jacobsen describe the behavioral change that occurred after they ablated the frontal lobes of Lucy and Becky’s brains. It is a small sample, just two chimpanzees since the others didn’t survive, and importantly, the behaviors they reported were opposite one another. One became more agitated about things she didn’t care much about before, the other less agitated about things she did care about. This should not have led anyone to the conclusion that this procedure be attempted on humans, and Fulton allegedly thought as much (although he continued with his lobotomy work on chimpanzees). In addition, in the 1930s, very little was actually understood about chimpanzee behavior, so what the experimenters report they believed about behavior must be viewed with skepticism. The first infant bred and born in a laboratory, Alpha, was in 1930 in part to begin to understand chimpanzee development and behavior. Altering the developing brain of infant and young chimpanzees, without understanding their species’ typical behaviors and their individual personalities, could not lead to any respectable conclusions. Sadly, this sort of scientific rationality was a large part of early biomedical research, and in the case of chimpanzees, at least,⁴ this “foolishness” continued for another fifty years.

At the conference, two important figures in the development of human lobotomies were in the audience, Egas Moniz and Freeman, who within months developed techniques and began performing lobotomies on humans. The desire to destroy unwanted emotion actually overtook reasoned assessment ironically in the name of scientific rationality. Lobotomy’s reputation once ran so high that the Nobel Committee awarded the prize in Medicine and Physiology to Moniz in 1949. But within the next decade, lobotomy fell out of favor and its memory increasingly was vilified.

The operation’s descent into disgrace had many causes. For one thing, lobotomy never had a scientific basis and animal work wasn’t thought to be useful as a foundation for the procedure because researchers couldn’t admit that animal models of mental illness existed. That was a barrier that the infamous Harry Harlow most notably sought to break with his psychological experiments on infant monkeys (Gluck 2016). Similar experiments on sensory and maternal deprivation were also being performed on chimpanzees at that time in an attempt to create animal models for despair, depression, schizophrenia, anxiety, addiction, and the like (R.M. Yerkes Papers). Of course, the advent of psycho-pharmaceuticals also played a role in ending the lobotomy. In the history of medicine, the lobotomy is one of the rare examples in which those within the biomedical community themselves share the negative assessment.

In 2005, Dr. Nuland, for example, began a discussion of the history of lobotomies noting:

Major steps in scientific progress are sometimes followed closely by outbursts of foolishness. New discoveries have a way of exciting the imagination of the well-meaning and misguided, who see theoretical potentialities in new knowledge that may prove impossible to attain. On occasion, the seemingly imminent is later shown to be far further off than originally thought, yet still possible to achieve. More frequently, the apparent prospect is revealed to be the result of unrealistic hypotheses based more on wishful thinking than on fact. In no branch of human thought have erroneous leaps of this kind been more prevalent than in that peculiar mix of science and art that goes by the name of medicine. (2005)

Nuland had a personal interest in the case of lobotomies, as someone who suffered from depression he was hospitalized and almost had a lobotomy, but a young physician recommended electric shock therapy instead. He ended up having a long notable career. Of this sorry chapter in medical history, Nuland writes: “Freeman’s foolishness influenced an entire generation of psychiatrists, neurologists, and neurosurgeons and devastated the lives of tens of thousands of patients and their families.” This tragic path “can serve as a cautionary tale about those who come to believe that they are beyond the restraints of judicious professional behavior.”

Despite the demise of the surgical lobotomy and the scientific maladies that followed, there is a more ideological sort of lobotomy—a cutting off of feeling or affect that has been much more successful, indeed entrenched, and it is to this sort of cognitive alienation that I now turn.

Affect

In the United States in recent years, due in large part to the wide availability of social media, the murder of black people by police officers has come to wider attention.⁵ One of those killings, of Philando Castile, was live streamed on Facebook by his partner Diamond Reynolds, whose four-year-old was also in the car. The video showed the police officer with his gun drawn on Castile who is in the driver’s seat bleeding out.

Many people who watched the video commented on Reynold’s composure. She was calm and appeared quite rational. For both black and white commentators, her composure seemed a sign of her trustworthiness as a witness. Of course, she and her young daughter needed to make it out alive, so there was good reason for her to be calm in the face of a panicked cop with a gun. But as Melvin Rogers notes, there is something else going on here:

We would never expect others to display such composure in the face of such traumatic circumstances. We would not penalize their failure of self-control by tying it to untrustworthiness. In fact, we think, and rightly, that emotional eruptions at precisely this moment are appropriate … It makes perfect sense to come undone in that moment … And yet, we find ourselves holding Reynolds and other black folks, often women, to a higher standard as a prerequisite to be considered trustworthy, capable of accurately recounting the injustice that has just been committed against them. In doing so, we commit another form of violence, the reverberations of which most assuredly affects the mental health of black folks, reminding us, yet again, that what is e...