Psychosurgery

noun

noun ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    Surgery of the brain to treat or alleviate mental illness. countable, uncountable

    "This was studied in humans where amygdalotomies were done not to control seizures but to control aggression. Such psychosurgery provoked fiery controversy in the 1970s. And I don't mean scientists not saying hello to each other at conferences. I mean a major public shit storm."

  2. 2
    brain surgery on human patients intended to relieve severe and otherwise intractable mental or behavioral problems wordnet

Synonyms

All synonyms
biofeedbackcounselingencounter therapygroup therapyhypnosishypnotism

Example

More examples

"This was studied in humans where amygdalotomies were done not to control seizures but to control aggression. Such psychosurgery provoked fiery controversy in the 1970s. And I don't mean scientists not saying hello to each other at conferences. I mean a major public shit storm."

Etymology

From psycho- + surgery.

Related phrases

mental illness

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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.