[5] He attended secondary school at Blackrock College, where he discovered jazz music, and began playing the trumpet.
According to Browne, his professor of medicine in the Richmond Hospital told him that: "You're only fit to be an obstetrician or a psychiatrist."
[5] He said of his work there: Nearly every Saturday morning one or two patients would be sent down from Grangegorman to have their brains 'chopped'... this was the major lobotomy procedure... where burr holes were drilled on each side of the temples and a blunt instrument inserted to sever the frontal lobes almost completely from the rest of the brain.
[6] After returning to Ireland, he became the fifth Medical Superintendent of Grangegorman Mental Hospital (St. Brendan's) in 1966[7] and he was made Professor of psychiatry at University College Dublin and Chief Psychiatrist of the Eastern Health Board.
[13] Browne's idea of trauma of "the frozen present" becomes a key part to understanding how he looks at psychiatric and psychotherapeutic work.
[citation needed] In an article published in Network Ireland magazine, Browne explains his attitude to trauma.
Once it is frozen it is outside of time, so twenty years later this can be activate – some everyday event can trigger it – and you then experience it as if it is happening now.
[15] In 1985, Browne published an article in the Irish Journal of Psychiatry, entitled "Psychological Trauma, or Unexperienced Experience" which at the time receive no citations.
Stan Grof believed in the importance of Browne's work,[citation needed] and republished the article in Revision magazine in 1990.
He said: When someone is depressed, [doctors] assume that this is caused by a disturbance in your biochemistry, which must be related to some sort of genetic thing in your personality.