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Welcome to Masks of Nyarlathotep (Chaosium Call of Cthulhu)

01:21, 29th March 2024 (GMT+0)

Doctor Phillip Weston

Born in 1864 in the sleepy coastal town of Hastings, Edward Bradley Weston was always fascinated by how the human mind worked. This is because Weston's father divorced his mother and moved from the UK to New York when Phillip was only 4, creating lifelong feelings of abandonment. After first studying at Imperial College Royal Hospital Chelsea as a young man, he moved to Germany and studied the emerging science of psychoanalysis under the field's pioneer Wilhelm Wundt, before completing his doctorate in experimental neurology under the groundbreaking Russian physiologist, Ivan Pavlov, at Berlin University.

When he was 21 he discovered his father had started a new family in New York, and he now had a half-brother, James, who was some 15 years his junior. Weston then moved to Vienna, where we was a practicing member of the Wednesday Psychological Society (Psychologischen Mittwoch-Gesellschaft) with contemporaries such as Sigmund Freud, G. Stanley Hall, Carl Jung, Abraham A. Brill, Ernest Jones and Sándor Ferenczi. Some years later he visited America and to his surprise, he and his half-brother James hit it off immensely. The half-brothers maintained a close friendship via correspondence, bolstered by Phillip's odd vacation and research trips to America.

In 1904 he moved back to England and set up a private practice in London's Harley Street. He gained a reputation as a unorthodox and experimental psychologist, often employing methods and theories that his peers thought outlandish and irrational. He developed a method of psychoanalysis called 'Introspective Structural Theory' which gained some feverish support when published in 1911, but was publicly derided by Jung and Freud as 'ungrounded and fantastical pomp'. Still, Weston continued his studies into experimental psychology and psycho-active, mid-altering pharmacology. These studies and experiments drew him into direct conflict with the Medical Practitioners Ethics Committee on various occasions, which coloured his reputation as being somewhat of a maverick in his field.

He recently took a consultant position as Consulting Experimental Psychology Advisor at Broadmoor Hospital, a high-security psychiatric hospital for the criminally insane in Berkshire. He was pleased to hear that James, now a NYPD detective, had been promoted to Lieutenant from Sergeant. Dr. Weston was heartbroken upon learning of his half-brother's untimely death and immediately took a leave of absence to travel to America to attend the funeral.