William Brown (psychologist)

William Brown FRCP (5 December 1881 – 17 May 1952) was a British psychologist and psychiatrist.

Biography

Brown was born in Slinfold, Sussex. He studied mathematics and philosophy at Christ Church, Oxford. He took medical training at King's College London and graduated MBBCh in Oxford in 1914. He worked as a neurologist in France where he helped develop a treatment for shell-shock in WW1 persons, and later returned to his post at King's College London where he earned a DM in 1918, MRCP in 1921 and was elected FRCP in 1930.[1]

In 1936 he became the director of the Institute of Experimental Psychology at Oxford University. Brown, along with May Smith, Cyril Burt, and John Flügel, were all students of William McDougall while the latter mentioned was a professor at Oxford. He was a Christian and had a lifelong interest in parapsychology. He served on the board of the Society for Psychical Research 1923-1940.[2]

Brown was associated with Harry Price and his National Laboratory of Psychical Research. He attended séances with the medium Helen Duncan at the laboratory and concluded she was fraudulent.[3]

Publications
  • Mind and Personality: An Essay in Psychology and Philosophy (1970)
  • Personality and Religion (1946)
  • Psychological Methods of Healing; An Introduction to Psychotherapy (1938)
  • Mind, Medicine and Metaphysics: The Philosophy of a Physician (1936)
  • Science and Personality (1929)
  • Suggestion and Mental Analysis: An Outline of the Theory and Practice of Mind Cure (1922)
  • William Brown, 'The psychologist in war-time', Lancet (1939), 1: 1288.
  • William Brown, 'The treatment of cases of shell shock in an advanced neurological centre', Lancet (1918), 2: 197.
  • William Brown, 'War neuroses', Lancet (1919), 2: 833.

References
  1. W.J. O'Connor. British Physiologists: 1885 - 1914: A Biographical Dictionary. Manchester University Press. p. 194. ISBN 978-0719032820
  2. Graham Richards. (2011). Psychology, Religion, and the Nature of the Soul: A Historical Entanglement. Springer. p. 81. ISBN 978-1441971722
  3. Valentine, Elizabeth R. (2011). Spooks and Spoofs: Relations Between Psychical Research and Academic Psychology in Britain in the Inter-War Period. History of the Human Sciences 25: 67-90.

Further reading
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