What some accounts suggest, cautiously, is that certain stimuli produced recognizable emotional responses in Rosemary — that being around her family seemed to produce something like pleasure as well as something like distress, that familiar settings and people evoked responses different from unfamiliar ones, that she was not simply a blank state of post-surgical functioning but a person with emotional memory of some kind.
Whether those emotional responses connected to any form of autobiographical memory — any sense of who she had been, what she had done, what had happened to her — cannot be established. The damage done to the frontal lobes affects not just motor function and speech but the organization of complex thought and memory in ways that are not fully understood even today.
What can be said is that the people who cared for Rosemary at Saint Coletta and who knew her during the decades of family contact treated her as a person with a continuous identity rather than as a clinical case. That treatment was itself significant. In an era when people with severe intellectual disabilities were often regarded as permanently childlike or as essentially non-persons, the sisters at Saint Coletta and the family members who eventually returned to Rosemary’s life chose to see her as someone who had a history and deserved to be treated in light of it.
Whether Rosemary herself experienced the continuity they were affirming from the outside is a question that must remain open.
The Broader Pattern: Who Got Lobotomies
Rosemary Kennedy was not alone in being subjected to a lobotomy she did not choose and whose risks were not fully communicated to her or her family. But she was, in one respect, unusual: her wealthy, politically connected family gave her a form of protection that most lobotomy patients did not have.