The operation was originally intended as a last resort for intractable patients, especially those in mental institutions before the advent of drugs like Thorazine made such patients easier to manage. But Dr. Freeman eventually expanded his practice to include patients who suffered from nothing more than migraine or postpartum depression. All told he performed some 3,000 lobotomies, including some on children as young as 4 , whom he believed to be suffering from the early onset of schizophrenia.

His most famous patient was President John F. Kennedy's sister Rosemary, whom he lobotomized in 1941 when she was 23 and who required full-time care until her death this year. In 1960, when the ice-pick procedure was already becoming obsolete, he lobotomized a crew-cut 12-year-old Californian named Howard Dully. If the purpose of a lobotomy is to deaden the patient's emotions, then that operation, too, was a failure. Today Mr. Dully, a huge, barrel-shaped 56-year-old, is warm, expansive and full of feeling. He has been married three times -- twice happily -- and has a grown-up son and a job he likes, driving a tour bus. Except for his family and a few close friends, no one knew he had been lobotomized, and on meeting him no one would ever guess it.

But a couple of years ago, feeling, as he puts it, as if some part of him were missing, Mr. Dully began to look into what had happened to him.

In the course of his research he crossed paths with Dave Isay, a producer of radio documentaries, who encouraged Mr. Dully to make a documentary of his own. A result was "My Lobotomy," a 22-minute piece that includes archival recordings of Dr. Freeman (he has one of those deep 1950's newsreel voices), as well as of his son, Frank, who talks about his father's "magnificent obsession," and an interview with Ellen Ionesco, the first patient to undergo the ice-pick procedure. The most compelling voice, though, is Mr. Dully's own gravelly rumble as he tries to come to terms with what amounts to a second-rate fairy tale. (The documentary had its premiere on Monday evening in an auditorium at Bellevue Hospital Center.)

He was lobotomized, it turns out, for no other reason than that he didn't get along with his stepmother, whose long list of complaints about him included sullenness, a reluctance to bathe and that he turned on the lights during daytime. Mr. Dully's father signed off on the procedure, without seeming to take much of an interest in it, and the most dramatic moment in the documentary comes when, after 40 years of silence on the subject, Mr. Dully asks him why. "I got manipulated pure and simple," the father says. "I was sold a bill of goods." But he quickly adds that "nobody is perfect" and that in any case he doesn't like to "dwell on negative ideas." "You shaped up pretty good," he says to his son.