TD 1
You feel music in the heart. IVOR BROWNE Psychiat
rist & author “I was always a bit of a maverick,” says Ivor Browne as we sat facing each other in his bright living room. I asked him what inspired his alternative approach to psychiatry when he worked in Grangegorman Hospital. “I was never satisfied,” he continued, “I’m still not satisfied with the reliance of drugs throughout the profession. Early on, I took the direction of psychotherapy. The heart of becoming a therapist is to go through therapy yourself. I would be unusual in that sense, as a psychiatrist, by getting involved in that.” As a newly qualified psychiatrist in 1950s Ireland, Browne witnessed patients receiving electroshock therapy and lobotomies to remedy mental illness. Horrified by these inhumane methods, Browne sought a natural form of healing that would call for patients to work through their experiences rather than sedate them. He arrived in Grangegorman in 1966, a handful of years before adopting a method called Holotropic Therapy. Based on a combination of music, breathing and bodywork, this mode of treatment was developed in the late 1960s by Stanislav Grof, a Czechoslovakian psychiatrist based in California, as a reaction to the suppression of legal LSD; a vital component in his other psychedelic therapy. Using an abandoned Protestant Church on the hospital grounds, Browne formalised the 26 practice of quadrophonic sound in weekly sessions. “We’d have maybe twelve patients, usually lying on a blanket. Each person had someone sitting with them to wipe their brow.” Browne recalled. Of the people he treated until he retired from the hospital in 1984, he noted that they came from the most disturbed units of the facility. Reflecting on the success of the therapy, Browne estimates that the equivalent of two of the most disturbed units were emptied over two decades. The general consensus amongst his colleagues regarding holotropic therapy, however, was one of total disinterest. “Nobody was doing this in Ireland. None of the psychiatrists working there came near the sessions, Browne said. “Mostly, they wouldn’t want to know. I think it had to do with the fact that they hadn’t opened up to their own experiences. They shied away from anything that threatened their approach, so they chose to remain uninvolved.” As a boy, Browne dreamt about becoming a musician, “I had visions of becoming Louis Armstrong. Someone said I should take up jazz and that put a bug in my head. I was feeling very lost, I didn’t know who or what I was, so I got addicted to that idea.” Today, the ninetyyear-old with a statuesque figure drives a Honda Jazz and searches for compilations of his favourite New Orleans-based music. Consecutive bouts of tuberculosis struck Browne as a teenager, stealing his ambition to pursue music professionally. Instead, he studied psychiatry and has practiced for over six decades, his clients include Tommy Tiernan, Colm Tóibín, and Mary Coughlan. Over his extensive career, Browne’s thesis has, fundamentally, been grounded by the influence of the heart. At one point during our afternoon together, he enquired how aware I am of my heart. Swiftly, the interview transformed into a therapy session. We spoke about trauma; how, as a teenager experiencing grief, I looked to lyrics from my favourite artists as a way to understand and articulate my feelings when I didn’t have the words. How music had, unbeknownst to me, provided a therapy. In recent years, he has become heavily involved with heart-centered meditations. “The heart sends more messages to the brain than the reverse. It has its own neurons, something like twenty or forty thousand neurons. It has its own brain and communicates with the rest of the body. People think it’s just a pump, it’s so much more than that.” I wanted to know why people form emotional connections to music, how it can provide relief. Without hesitation, Browne stated through a smile, “You feel music in the heart.” ➝