A few years ago, during an interview, I used the word ‘self’ a number of times in phrases like ‘the distance between the social presence and the self’, or ‘the ways in which the self might emerge in a novel’, or ‘systems in which the self is both hidden and revealed.’  

After a while, the interviewer asked me: ‘What do you mean by the word self?’. I hesitated for a moment and then said that maybe we could discuss that matter another time. 

I wonder if I got my notion of the self from the psychiatrist Ivor Browne who died recently in Dublin at the age of ninety-four.

I met Ivor first in 1983 when, as editor of Magill magazine, I had commissioned a long piece from his then partner and later his wife June Levine. At the time, June and Ivor lived in Dun Laoghaire. Sometimes, at the end of the day, I would go out to their place to go through drafts of her article with June. 

Before then, I must have seen Ivor on television. I was aware that he was Professor of Psychiatry at UCD and that he ran Grangegorman Mental Hospital, the largest in Dublin. But I had never met him in person. I was surprised at how gentle and quiet-spoken he seemed. At that time in Dublin, doctors tended to be full of themselves.

Also, Ivor was wearing Indian clothes, which, then as now, were not habitual among the medical profession in Ireland even in the privacy of their own houses.

When he discovered that I was not a jazz aficionado, Ivor smiled and shook his head and appeared disappointed. Almost by accident, on another evening, he mentioned something about a string quartet. And I remember him focusing intensely on me when I asked him if he knew the late Beethoven quartets. Immediately, he wanted to put some recording on the turntable so we could listen.

That night, as one of the quartets played, I felt that Ivor was watching me, even though his eyes were closed most of the time. It was something I would notice – a sort of power he had. He had no small talk. Gossip didn’t interest him; he didn’t tell jokes or make large statements. The news of the day seemed to have passed him by. He didn’t drink or smoke. He was very tall, but his height did not make him formidable. 

Something else made him formidable. But in those early months as I got to know him, I was not sure what it was.

He asked me one evening if my parents were alive. I told him my father had died when I was twelve. Soon, I found, he asked me almost the same questions every time we met. 

After a while, when I knew him better, I would implore Ivor not to give me that searching look as he asked probing questions about how I had dealt with the death of my father. I had never told anyone what it was like, six weeks after my father’s death, to go to the very school he had been teaching in, sit in the classrooms where he had taught, make the same journey from school to home that he had taken until he died. 

In every classroom, I sat in the back on my own. In the evenings, when I was meant to be studying, I wrote poems.

 *

One evening, when June and Ivor had moved to Ranelagh, there was a noisy dinner-party. As Ivor, sitting beside me, probed me further about my father, I became desperate to contribute to the noise. I asked him if we could talk about this another time.

‘There is something I have been meaning to say to you,’ Ivor said quietly. ‘If you came to see me, I think I could help you.’

‘Doctor, doctor, can I eat my dinner?’ I implored.

‘Ivor,’ June interjected, ‘leave Colm alone.’

The question of being ‘treated’ by Ivor became almost a joke. I didn’t want treatment. I was busy. 

So, when June Levine called me – this must have been the spring of 1992 – and said that she needed someone to spend a weekend as her ‘minder’ in the sessions Ivor supervised in the old Protestant church in the grounds of Grangegorman Mental Hospital, I should have said I was too busy. I knew vaguely about these sessions. They were for people who had been through serious trauma, for whom pills and talk therapy had more or less failed. Patients arrived for these sessions on a Friday and left on Sunday. 

On the phone, I foolishly agreed to accompany June and be the one who would stay close to her as she went through whatever forms of therapy Ivor and his colleagues had devised. I had learned with June and Ivor never to ask about any of the people Ivor was treating. So, I didn’t ask June why she herself was going to sessions, as though she was suffering from trauma.

Before this, Ivor must have explained that ‘suffering from trauma’ was not a correct term. When trauma, or some large sudden reason for suffering, comes, he said, we block it, we do not experience it, we pretend it is not there, we do anything except live through it. We avoid it; we deny it. And so it lives like a stone in us.

A few days before that weekend in Grangegorman, it emerged that Ivor and June believed that I was coming to the session as an actual patient. I felt there had been a misunderstanding. I was worried. However, as I parked my car in the grounds of the old mental hospital that Friday afternoon, I realized that I could slip away anytime. I made plans to do so if things became too hot inside.

At the beginning, we – about fifty of us divided into small groups – made paintings and wrote out little stories. I was looking forward to my next dinner with Ivor so that I could make fun of this new way of wasting my time. Was this what it had come to, I would ask. Grown people sitting around in a ring? Was this why Freud had written ‘The Interpretation of Dreams’? Not to speak of ‘The Psychopathology of Everyday Life’.

My paintings were awful. June painted a sunset. 

*

At some point on that Friday evening, following instructions, I lay down on a mattress in a corner of the church with June Levine sitting close by. Other patients made themselves comfortable too; each pair seemed to create a discrete space around themselves. No one talked much. Things became settled. As the lights were dimmed slightly and soft music played, I felt I might go asleep. 

The lights continued to go down. Some jagged music was added, and sounds like crying, but in the distance. And then the voice of one of Ivor’s colleagues came through the speakers telling us to imagine that our breath was liquid. Some pressure was building up, but I was not sure from where. It was as if something were being added to the air. There were more noises, weirder ones. And then the voice telling us to imagine we were running, our breath still liquid. Faster now. And the music not soft anymore, and the lights still going down. Run faster, the voice said. Imagine someone is following you.

At precisely the same second, every person who was lying on the mattresses went into another state. This was not induced by drugs. It happened, it seemed, of its own accord. People began to cry out. Soon, very soon, I stopped paying attention to anyone else. When June Levine asked me if I was all right, I barely replied. I knew that I was here in Grangegorman. I knew June was beside me and that Ivor was close-by. If I wanted to go to the bathroom, I could do so. When I wanted a Kleenex, I could ask June. 

I was me now, but I was also, in a more real and vivid way, in my parents’ bedroom on the morning my father died.  

I was fully present in the past. And I wasn’t just remembering how I felt then. I was actually having the feelings – of shock, violent sadness, disbelief – as pressing and as happening in real time.

Later, I discovered that everyone who was lying on those mattresses in that church on that day experienced some kind of transformation. I never learned the details of what happened to other people. None of us shared our experiences. This was not the task. The task was to have the experiences, have them for the first time.

Over the months that followed I discussed what happened with Ivor. My experience in the church changed and changed again that Friday night. And once more, when I repeated the exercise the next day. It moved from being intense to becoming unbearable. 

The problem was that I had no idea how to release myself from this trance. I told June that I wanted Ivor to get me out of this state. She went and found him. He arrived and looked at me. He said: not yet, stay like that for a while more, I don’t think you have finished yet.  

In those subsequent discussions with Ivor I learned that he didn’t really need to know the details of what happened to me that Friday and Saturday. The aim was not to find material to form the basis of talk-therapy sessions. Instead, what I learned on that mattress was for me to know, to have, to live with. It belonged to me. 

‘You’re the one who has to do the work,’ Ivor would say.

He did worry, however, that all this knowledge, all this raw experience, all this release of what had been bottled up, might have an effect on my writing. (I had, at that time, finished my second novel.) Maybe my need to create fictions, Ivor wondered, might not be as pressing in the future. If writing novels were done out of need, what if that need began to dissolve? He really wasn’t sure.

It took a while to convince Ivor the impulse to write was not merely a form of neurosis. Or not any more than the impulse to become a psychiatrist.

Instead, what happened in the church made some literary texts seem richer for me, more worthy of close attention. The Circe episode in Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’, for example, in which the characters live out nightmares and dreams and hidden desires as though in real time. Some novels by Joseph Conrad in which language appears like a veil slowly lifted and pulled back, as the characters seem to have an inner life, a secret life, that must remain in shadow. Or stories about doubles such as ‘Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde’ or Joseph Conrad’s ‘The Secret Sharer’ or Henry James’s ‘The Jolly Corner’. Or, later on, the poems of Louise Glück in which an inner, wounded self, the one that has been hidden, seeks to emerge and, for once, speak clearly.

What we see when we meet someone or what we create when we present ourselves to the world is thin and brittle; it has been created to cover over the shadows within. 

This is what I saw in that church.

And I saw too that, as I create characters in my books or presences, I have to know that behind the eyes – behind all the looking and gazing – and behind the words – behind all the fluency and wit – there is something that haunts us or lives within us, all of us, something that we ourselves might never be able to name. 

It can hardly be called the soul. Could we, with any accuracy, call it the self?  

Colm Tóibín (January 2024)