The Writings of Ivor Browne: Steps along the road-the evolution of a slow learner

Foreword

Somehow you tried to be one human being working with another. – Ivor Browne Ivor Browne is one of Ireland’s great liberators. Such a word is normally used only to describe those who furthered religious and civil freedom or political independence. But it applies here nonetheless – doubly so, in fact. Browne is a literal liberator: he was a key figure in the freeing of thousands of people from institutional incarceration, a process described in these crucial writings. That alone would make these papers highly significant social documents, as important in their own way as the archives of government departments or the makers of economic policy. (It is not entirely coincidental that he dates his own beginnings as a ‘slow learner’ in the field of psychiatry to 1958, the same year in which Kenneth Whitaker’s programme of economic modernization began the transformation of the Republic.) But Ivor Browne is a liberator in another sense, too. Alongside his pioneering work as a psychiatrist, he is one of the most important public intellectuals in Ireland in the second half of the twentieth century . Not merely for what he says but for the way he says it. Readers will find themselves in this volume encountering a free mind, one that is open, questioning, utterly unintimidated by orthodoxies and entirely comfortable with the way his ideas took him from the centre to the margins of his profession. It is not necessary to agree with everything – indeed with anything – he writes to be engaged and invigorated by the exemplary way in which he combines calm rationality with a fearless questioning of received wisdom about how humanity works and what happens when it doesn’t. In his writings and speeches, the image of the godlike healer with all the answers is replaced by that of the explorer, entering into what is still the greatest terra incognita of all: the human mind. Browne has enough serene confidence not to Foreword FINTAN O’TOOLE xi worry about being out of step with current fashions of thought in his profession and enough awareness of the limitations of knowledge to remain deeply modest. There is no false modesty, indeed, in this book’s subtitle and its reference to the author as a ‘slow learner’. For what we have here is not a retrospective account of Browne’s career and thinking (he has already given us that in Music and Madness) but the organic immediacy of a man thinking on his feet. An important aspect of these papers is that they are contemporary documents. They are not edited to remove material that may, with hindsight, seem embarrassing. It is interesting, for example, to note that ‘homosexuality’ is listed along with depression and psychopathic tendencies as a ‘diagnosis’ in one of the early papers. Equally interesting, of course, is that that same paper describes an experiment with LSD as a therapeutic aid – a practice that was by no means unique but that other psychiatrists tend not to talk about. We do, however, get a profound sense of why experimental therapies were needed. Throughout the world, mental hospitals had become fearsome institutions in which people could be subjected to extreme ‘cures’ – insulin comas, lobotomies, massive doses of electroconvulsive therapy – with no proven therapeutic value and no concern for the rights and dignity of patients. Asking questions, not just about these practices but about the mechanistic models of the human personality that made them possible, was a moral duty. And even more of a duty in Ireland than elsewhere. Ivor Browne was one of the first people to point out, in papers re-published here, that Ireland locked up a larger proportion of its population in mental hospitals than any other known society. In 1955, when he was just beginning on his journey in psychiatry, Ireland had 710 psychiatric beds per 100,000 people; the Soviet Union had 617; the United States 511; Northern Ireland 440; Scotland 436; Sweden 422; England and Wales 357 and Australia 332. Browne captures here the sheer, dehumanising awfulness of what this meant for so many vulnerable people: ‘When, in 1958, I first visited St Brendan’s, the main mental hospital serving the greater Dublin area, I was appalled by what I found. All kinds of human beings jumbled in together , the severely mentally handicapped, the epileptic, the frail elderly and severely disturbed, were all herded together in overcrowded wards often containing a hundred or more patients.’ xii Foreword [3.16.137.232] Project MUSE (2024-04-25 21...