Oliver Williams - Psychological Trauma: The life work of Ivor Browne, M.D.
Uploader: Breaking Convention
Original upload date: Thu, 05 Dec 2019 00:00:00 GMT
Archive date: Thu, 16 Dec 2021 02:45:03 GMT
Full Talk Title: Psychological Trauma or Unexperienced Experience. The life work of Ivor Browne, M.D.
Having worked with my own trauma, in 1995 Stan Grof introduced me to the 1985 hypothesis of Ivo
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r Browne, MD, titled “Psychological Trauma or Unexperienced Experience” (UE), during his Transpersonal Training. I have found, during the subsequent years of offering breathwork and medicine work, UE to be consistently borne out during sessions in non-ordinary consciousness. Browne’s hypothesis, however, has been neither acknowledged nor cited by the psychiatric orthodoxy, and this talk is a modest attempt to redress this wilful ignoring. Browne posits that when we are traumatised, the psyche, sensing that we are experiencing an event that threatens to destabilise the organism, cuts us off from our ordinary consciousness of by involuntarily throwing us into non-ordinary consciousness within which we may retain zero memories of the experience.
We then go forward as best we can, over-living the experience that resides ‘incohate’ within us, surviving but not thriving. However, if we are able to approach work that reliably gives access to a non-ordinary state, we can revisit the hidden trauma in a way that allows for its durable release. Ivor Browne, working assiduously throughout his career to end the warehousing of mental patients in his native Ireland, also worked in 1959 with Joshua Bierer at the Marlborough Day Hospital in Maida Vale, treating psychotic patients with LSD.
In 1960 he studied at Harvard University where he was himself experientially introduced to this medicine. These experiences gave Browne the insight into the workings of the deep psyche that resulted in his seminal hypothesis. Browne’s work can best be understood from his two books, “Music and Madness” (2008) and “The Writings of Ivor Browne”(2013). His hypothesis has recently been appreciatively referenced in “Trust, Surrender, Receive” by Anne Other (2017).
Oliver Williams left for the US in 1972 to continue his illustration career and pursue primal therapy and neo-Reichian approaches to well-being. Beginning breathwork in 1992, he studied with Grof Transpersonal Training between 1994 – 1996. During this time he was introduced by Stan to the hypothesis of “Psychological Trauma or Unexperienced Experience” (UE) by Irish psychiatrist Ivor Browne, MD. Since 1996 he has offered breath@work groups and one-on-one medicine sessions focused on trauma, and has consistently witnessed the release mechanism-of-action per Browne’s UE. Oliver considers that this elegant hypothesis offers the key to both understanding and to durably releasing trauma.
Filmed at Breaking Convention 2019