Returning to New Zealand he taught at Wanganui Collegiate, until 1915, when he enlisted as a sergeant and was posted with the medical corps to Egypt, landing at Suez on July 27.
A. Hadfield, Ian Dishart Suttie, Crichton Miller, John Macmurray, Edward Glover, Carl Jung, Alfred Adler, Wilhelm Stekel and others.
[5] Dr John Hardwick-Smith remembered him as being part of a group considered "the lunatic fringe" at the Tavistock because they saw "the whole of psychopathology as centred around the child at the breast", though less so than Melanie Klein.
[9] In 1943, he spoke at the annual conference of the Christchurch branch of the New Education Fellowship and again as a key speaker at a public meeting, against corporal punishment of children, saying it was "dangerous to mental health and not conducive to true discipline".
[15] In his turn, Bevan-Brown criticised the "pernicious and fallacious pseudoscientific views" that indoctrinated mothers into leaving their babies to cry, ignoring their maternal instincts.
[16] Bevan-Brown and Enid Cook were on the panel of editors of the influential American bi-monthly Child-Family Digest, alongside the writings of Grantly Dick-Read, Ashley Montague and James Clark Maloney.
[1] A 1996 history of the association, in a nine-page section headed "The Bevan-Brown Era", describes him as outstanding for his "warmth of personality, breadth of educational background, quality and variety of professional experience" and his "major contribution to mental health, psychiatry and psychotherapy".
[28] He also referred to those influences in connection with both masturbation[29] and homosexuality[30] A review of The Sources of Love and Fear in the periodical Landfall said it would be of particular value to people confused about the issues, in view of the controversy aroused by the Cranmer House Clinic and the Christchurch Psychological Society.
In it she reports Helen Brew as saying The Sources of Love and Fear spread "like a forest fire" and quickly went out of print, sending "shockwaves through the medical and psychological professions" which then dismissed him as a crank.
[34] Psychiatrist Dr Ian McDougall commented in 1996 that the book now feels old fashioned and slightly preachy, but much in its basic messages is "consistent with contemporary attachment theory, object relations and self psychology" and it "contributed significantly to the changes we take for granted 50 years later".
[35] Central to Bevan-Brown's thinking was the importance of the sensuous mother-child breastfeeding relationship, going so far as to say that there were "risks attaching to the development of any baby who has the misfortune not to be breast-fed.
[43] His teaching greatly influenced the philosophy and direction of Parents' Centres in dealing with growing disquiet among mothers concerned about hospital childbirth's effects on them and their children.
[44] The first national Parents' Centres conference was held at the hall of the Andover Street clinic, with participants on mattresses, marae style.
"[46] Helen Brew describes Bevan-Brown as having "a quality of innocent bewilderment" at the amount of resistance to so many obviously healthy, sane and reasonable things he advocated.
[47] Linda Bryder comments that King had no authority to make such an offer and the council would probably not have agreed because Bevan-Brown had resigned from the NZBMA, and his role would have cut Plunket Society off from the medical establishment.