Donald Ewen Cameron
Encyclopedia
Donald Ewen Cameron commonly referred to as "D. Ewen Cameron" or "Ewen Cameron," was a twentieth-century Scottish
-born psychiatrist
who was involved in the United States
Central Intelligence Agency
's (CIA's) research on mind control
and served as President of the Canadian, American and World Psychiatric Associations, the American Psychopathological Association and the Society of Biological Psychiatry during the 1950s.
, Scotland
, in 1901, the son of a Presbyterian minister. His Scottish education culminated in 1925 when he received his diploma in psychological medicine from the University of Glasgow
. That same year, at the Royal Mental Hospital
in Glasgow
, he became influenced by Sir David Henderson, who had been taught by Adolf Meyer
, a psychiatrist whose broadened perspective on psychiatry was to influence Cameron for the rest of his life. In 1919 Henderson had become the director-general of the Red Cross in Geneva
. In 1926, Cameron left for America to work with Meyer at the Phipps Clinic at Johns Hopkins Hospital
. At the Phipps Clinic he held the Henderson research scholarship in psychiatry for two years. In 1938 he left Phipps for the famous Burghoelizi Clinic in Switzerland, where he studied under Hans W. Meier, the successor of Eugen Bleuler
, another man who had significantly influenced psychiatric thinking.
In Switzerland, Cameron met the principal psychiatrist of the province of Manitoba, A.T. Mathers, who convinced the young Cameron to come to Manitoba, a place not at the forefront of psychiatry in the 1920s, but Cameron managed to have a successful career. Cameron was in charge of the admissions unit in Brandon, Manitoba and he organized the structure of mental health services in the western half of the Canadian province. In the city of Brandon and surrounding area, Cameron established ten functioning clinics and this model was utilized as the forerunner of 1960s community health models.
In 1926 he was serving as Assistant Medical Officer, Glasgow Royal
Mental Hospital
.
In 1933 he married Jean Rankine, a competitive tennis player and Lecturer
in Mathematics at Glasgow, and together they would have three sons and one daughter.
In 1936, he moved to Massachusetts to become director of the research division at Worcester State Hospital, and from 1939 to 1943 he was professor of neurology and psychiatry at Albany Medical College in Albany, New York, and at the Russell Sage School of Nursing, also in the Albany area. During those years, Cameron began to expand on his thoughts about the interrelationships of mind and body, and developed a reputation as a psychiatrist who could bridge the gap between the organic, structural neurologists, and the psychiatrists whose knowledge of anatomy was limited to maps of the mind as opposed to maps of the brain. Through his instruction of nurses and psychiatrists he became known as an authority in his areas of concentration.
Cameron focused primarily on biological descriptive psychiatry and applied the British and European schools and models of the practice. Cameron followed these schools of psychiatry in demanding that mental disturbances were diseases and are somatic in nature. All psychological illness were thus hardwired and a product of the body and the direct result of the patients biological structure rather than caused by social, societal or family relationships. The characteristics were thus diagnosed as syndromes, emerging from the brain. It is at this juncture that Cameron began to more and more interested with how he could effectively manipulate the brain in order to control and understand the processes of memory. Cameron furthermore, wanted to understand the problems of memory caused by aging. He believed that the aged brain suffered from psychosis and thus would need to prematurely age brains in order to observe the effect.
In 1936, Cameron published his first book, Objective and Experimental Psychiatry. It introduced his lifelong belief that psychiatry should strive to approach the study of human behavior in a rigorous, scientific fashion. Clearly rooted in biology, his theories of behavior stressed the unity of the organism with the environment. He outlines the experimental method and the research design. Cameron believed firmly in clinical psychiatry and a strict scientific method.
In 1943, during World War II, Cameron returned to Canada. Cameron was invited to McGill University in Montreal at the urgings of the world-famous neurosurgeon, Wilder Penfield. There, with a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, money from J.D. McConnell of the Montreal Star, and a gift of the mansion of Sir Allan on Mount Royal, the Allan Memorial Institute was founded. For the next twenty-one years, Cameron's vision, determination, and adroit political maneuvering led to the astounding growth of the Institute. Cameron recruited Psychiatrists from Europe and around the world to build the psychiatry program at McGill. The team included psychoanalysts, social psychiatrists and biologists. Cameron developed a network of psychiatric services for Montreal.
In 1945 because of his reputation as a psychiatrist and the success of his instituting of psychiatric programs throughout Canada, the United States and Europe, Cameron was invited to Nuremberg to evaluate Rudolph Hess. This was an opportunity for Cameron to represent the new system and networks of psychiatry that he had instituted in Canada. He was joined at Nuremberg by the Soviets, Krasnushkin, Sepp and Kurshakov, Lord Moran, Rees and Riddoch from England; Lewis, Schroeder and himself from North America; and Professor Delay from France. In Germany, Cameron observed and recorded the methods utilized in the war, such as tortures, authority, powerlessness, individual motivations of prisoners and guards, and that the behaviors could be monitored by social scientists that were brave enough to look at the conditions experienced by those who suffered through torture and murder during World War II and with a concentration on Rudolph Hess' human experiments. Cameron was asked to assess both Hess' experiments and his sanity.
Before his arrival in Nuremberg Cameron wrote a paper titled The Social Reorganization of Germany. Cameron argued that German culture and its individual citizens would have to be transformed and reorganized. His analysis of German culture was that it is made up of people who had the need for status, that they worshiped strict order and regimentation, desired authoritarian leadership and had a hostile fear of other countries. The paper continued to state that German culture and its people will have offspring that in 30 years from 1945, would be the biggest threat to world peace. As a consequence the West would have to take measures to reorganize German society to prevent the coming of the offspring that would threaten world peace and order. Cameron focused on destroying the social organization of Germany which throughout history had repeatedly given birth to fearsome aggression. Cameron wanted to remove the social order of Germany that continually gave rise to the monstrosities of World War II. His arguments made it precisely a problem particular to the people of Germany and of the German race. Other psychiatric diagnoses of Germany took place at the same time such as Richard Max Brickner's, Is Germany Incurable(1943), Paul Winkler's, The thousand-year conspiracy: secret Germany behind the mask(1943), Fredrick Martin Stern, The Junker Meanace(1945), Sebastian Haffner's, Germany: Jekyll and Hyde: An Eyewitness Analysis of Nazi Germany(1941) and Sigrid Lillian Schultz, Germany will try it again(1944). Along with Cameron's own testament to the experiences of life in World War II Germany, these texts gave the West both a historical and psychological picture of the Germans and the German race. Brickner asked the newly formed United Nations to look at Germany as "the ward of the world". It was Cameron's expertise in biological psychiatric practice that was able to win the interpretation of the necessary measures to enforce against the German people after World War II and to be applied by the allied occupying forces in Germany. Furthermore, it is through Cameron's expertise at the Nuremberg trials and the Red Cross, that we are given the knowledge of the Medical regime in Germany during World War II. Cameron's purpose in Germany was to make sure that the country would never rise as a military threat after the war. In short, it was left to Donald Ewen Cameron to be the expert to tell the world what race of people could be likely to commit the crimes of WWII. He would be the one with authority to determine who made the crimes.
Cameron started to distinguish populations between the weak and the strong. Those with anxieties or insecurities, those who had trouble with the state of the world were labeled as the weak. Those with social problems and issues, those who could not cope with life, had to be isolated from society by the strong. The mentally ill were then labeled not only as sick but as weak. Cameron further argued that the weak must not influence children. He promoted a philosophy where chaos could be prevented by removing the weak from society. This resembles the sociobiology of the late 19th and early 20th century and the emerging psychiatric understanding of the entirety of society. People needed to be known through psychiatric analysis in order to thwart a violent and chaotic society.
For Cameron, political and national agendas reflected the genetics of a race of people, therefore, politics and nationalities were genetically based and societies that selected for the political and social aptness, were selecting the right genes. For example Cameron might suggest immigration policies and those immigration policies would be selecting for the correct genes, for political inclinations were an expression of genetics. For Cameron, mental conditions and illnesses were contagious and mechanism in society could both prevent and cause mental illness. If one came into contact with something or someone known to cause mental illness, was a sign one would begin to produce the symptoms of a mental disease. For example something like rock music could be created by mentally ill people and would produce mentally disturbed or ill people through infection which in turn would be transmitted to the genes. Thus this group would have to be studied and controlled as a contagious social disease. Although, mental illness is genetic, environmental factors can transform genes through infection. Coming into contact with the mentally ill, without proper authority, results in an infection of mental disease. Police, Hospitals, Government, and Schools, would need to utilize the correct psychiatric authority to stop mental contagions from spreading. Cameron hoped also to generate families capable of utilizing authority and techniques to take measures against mental illness, this would come to be apparent in Cameron's MK Ultra and Delta experiments. Everyday people would learn to help police and quarantine the aspects and persons of society deemed as leading to mental illness. Inside hospitals nurses would be given the authority to establish the mental characteristics of the parents and the new born baby, in terms of genetic, national and racial orientation as well as the personal histories of the parents. This is part of Donald Ewen Cameron's contribution of psychiatric authority to contemporary hospital practice in society and is closely linked to some hospital practices of forced sterilization. Cameron's idea for a societal cure differs from Freud's, where Freud proposed a talking cure, Cameron did not believe in a cure but a form of quarantine and extermination. Cameron wanted better societal functions, to expose mental deficiencies, environments that might frustrate the mentally weak, however help to reinforce the authority of the psychiatric society. Where Freud saw symptoms of repression, Cameron saw genetic weakness, biological determination and symptoms of social contamination as causes for mental illness. Cameron's elemental construction of society is not based on repression or the unconscious, id, ego and superego, but is socio-biologically determined as founded on genetics. Cameron's own use of authority, discipline and control is not seen as any materialization of an unconscious drive. However, it is unclear how Ewen Cameron's own Presbyterian upbringing, the fact that his own Father was a minister, may have factored into his psychiatric theory on social deviance.
In Cameron's book Life is For Living, published in 1948 he expressed a concern for the German Race in general. Just as the French Sigrid Lillian Schultz's stated in, Germany will try it again, Cameron fostered a fear for Germans and that they are genetically determined. In Life is for living Cameron continued developing his fears and concerns around Germans. The Germans that were affected by the events that would lead to World War II were of utmost concern. Cameron's own anxieties were extended to his policies determining who should have children and be able to excel to authority positions. Naturally, according to Cameron's psychiatric analysis of the German race, the Germans were not suitable to have children or hold positions of authority in society because of their genetic tendency of organizing society towards one that fosters fearsome aggression and would lead to war rather than peace. Cameron would repeatedly utilize the German as the archetypal character structure on which to ground the most psychologically deviant of human races.
In the late 1940s, Cameron presented his ideas in a lecture entitled, Dangerous Men and Women. In it he described various personalities that he believed were of marked danger to society. The individuals he described were dangerous to all members of society including children. The first type that Cameron describes is a passive man who "is afraid to say what he really thinks", "he will stand anything, and stands for nothing", and Cameron gives him a racial and national distinction, "he was born in Munich, he is the eternal compromiser and his spiritual food is appeasement" The second type is a possessive type; filled with jealousy and demand utmost loyalty. Those who are in danger of this person are those closest to them; the affect on children can be devastating. The third type is the insecure man, "They are the driven crowds that makes the army of the authoritarian overlord; they are the stuffing of conservatism ... mediocrity is their god. They fear the stranger, they fear the new idea; they are afraid to live, and scared to die." This third type need conformity and obey the dictates of society, much as the German who worships authority, this type create a world of strict right or wrong which is manipulated by power groups to keep the insecure under control and dependent, and this type for its lust for authority is dangerous. The last type is the psychopath the greatest danger in times of political and societal upheaval; this he merely called "the Gestapo". Cameron believed that a society where psychiatry built and developed the institutions of government, schools, prisons, and hospitals would be one where science triumphs over these sick members of society. Cameron demanded that political systems had to be watched and the German needed to be monitored due to its personality type which results in the conditions that give rise to dictatorial power of an authoritarian overlord. The German always lusted for a master. Cameron stated "Get it understood how dangerous these damaged, sick personalities are to ourselves - and above all, to our children, whose traits are taking form and we shall find ways to put an end to them." He spoke about Germans, but also to the larger portion of the society that resembled or associated with such traits. For Cameron the traits were contagions and anyone affected by the societal, cultural or personality forms would themselves be infected. Cameron utilized his ideas to implement policies on who should govern and who should parent in society. The described types would have to be eliminated from society in order for there to be peace and progress. The sick were in fact, for Cameron, the viral infection to its stability and health. The described types were the enemies of society and life. Experts must develop methods of forcefully changing attitudes and beliefs, in order to prevent the authoritarian overlord.
Cameron lived and worked in Albany, New York
, and was involved in experiments in Canada
for Project MKULTRA
, a United States
based CIA-directed mind control
program which eventually led to the publication of the KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation manual.
Naomi Klein
states in her book "The Shock Doctrine
" that Dr Cameron's research and his contribution to the MKUltra project was actually not about mind control and brainwashing, but "to design a scientifically based system for extracting information from 'resistant sources.' In other words, torture
.", and citing a book from Alfred W. McCoy
it further says that "Stripped of its bizarre excesses, Dr. Cameron's experiments, building upon Dr. Donald O. Hebb's earlier breakthrough, laid the scientific foundation for the CIA's two-stage psychological torture method."
It was during this era that Cameron became known worldwide as the first chairman of the World Psychiatric Association as well as president of the American and Canadian psychiatric associations. Cameron had also been a member of the Nuremberg medical tribunal in 1946–47.
Scotland
Scotland is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. Occupying the northern third of the island of Great Britain, it shares a border with England to the south and is bounded by the North Sea to the east, the Atlantic Ocean to the north and west, and the North Channel and Irish Sea to the...
-born psychiatrist
Psychiatrist
A psychiatrist is a physician who specializes in the diagnosis and treatment of mental disorders. All psychiatrists are trained in diagnostic evaluation and in psychotherapy...
who was involved in the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
Central Intelligence Agency
Central Intelligence Agency
The Central Intelligence Agency is a civilian intelligence agency of the United States government. It is an executive agency and reports directly to the Director of National Intelligence, responsible for providing national security intelligence assessment to senior United States policymakers...
's (CIA's) research on mind control
Mind control
Mind control refers to a process in which a group or individual "systematically uses unethically manipulative methods to persuade others to conform to the wishes of the manipulator, often to the detriment of the person being manipulated"...
and served as President of the Canadian, American and World Psychiatric Associations, the American Psychopathological Association and the Society of Biological Psychiatry during the 1950s.
Early life and career
Donald Ewen Cameron was born in Bridge of AllanBridge of Allan
Bridge of Allan is a town in Stirling council area in Scotland, just north of the city of Stirling. It was formerly administered by Stirlingshire and Central Regional Council....
, Scotland
Scotland
Scotland is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. Occupying the northern third of the island of Great Britain, it shares a border with England to the south and is bounded by the North Sea to the east, the Atlantic Ocean to the north and west, and the North Channel and Irish Sea to the...
, in 1901, the son of a Presbyterian minister. His Scottish education culminated in 1925 when he received his diploma in psychological medicine from the University of Glasgow
University of Glasgow
The University of Glasgow is the fourth-oldest university in the English-speaking world and one of Scotland's four ancient universities. Located in Glasgow, the university was founded in 1451 and is presently one of seventeen British higher education institutions ranked amongst the top 100 of the...
. That same year, at the Royal Mental Hospital
Gartnavel Royal Hospital
Gartnavel Royal Hospital is a mental health facility based in the west end of Glasgow, Scotland. It provides inpatient psychiatric care for the population of the West of the City; covering Hillhead, Partick, Scotstoun, Yoker, Clydebank, Drumchapel, Bearsden and Milngavie...
in Glasgow
Glasgow
Glasgow is the largest city in Scotland and third most populous in the United Kingdom. The city is situated on the River Clyde in the country's west central lowlands...
, he became influenced by Sir David Henderson, who had been taught by Adolf Meyer
Adolf Meyer (psychiatrist)
Adolf Meyer, M.D., LL.D., , was a Swiss psychiatrist who rose to prominence as the president of the American Psychiatric Association and was one of the most influential figures in psychiatry in the first half of the twentieth century...
, a psychiatrist whose broadened perspective on psychiatry was to influence Cameron for the rest of his life. In 1919 Henderson had become the director-general of the Red Cross in Geneva
Geneva
Geneva In the national languages of Switzerland the city is known as Genf , Ginevra and Genevra is the second-most-populous city in Switzerland and is the most populous city of Romandie, the French-speaking part of Switzerland...
. In 1926, Cameron left for America to work with Meyer at the Phipps Clinic at Johns Hopkins Hospital
Johns Hopkins Hospital
The Johns Hopkins Hospital is the teaching hospital and biomedical research facility of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, located in Baltimore, Maryland . It was founded using money from a bequest by philanthropist Johns Hopkins...
. At the Phipps Clinic he held the Henderson research scholarship in psychiatry for two years. In 1938 he left Phipps for the famous Burghoelizi Clinic in Switzerland, where he studied under Hans W. Meier, the successor of Eugen Bleuler
Eugen Bleuler
Paul Eugen Bleuler was a Swiss psychiatrist most notable for his contributions to the understanding of mental illness and for coining the term "schizophrenia."-Biography:...
, another man who had significantly influenced psychiatric thinking.
In Switzerland, Cameron met the principal psychiatrist of the province of Manitoba, A.T. Mathers, who convinced the young Cameron to come to Manitoba, a place not at the forefront of psychiatry in the 1920s, but Cameron managed to have a successful career. Cameron was in charge of the admissions unit in Brandon, Manitoba and he organized the structure of mental health services in the western half of the Canadian province. In the city of Brandon and surrounding area, Cameron established ten functioning clinics and this model was utilized as the forerunner of 1960s community health models.
In 1926 he was serving as Assistant Medical Officer, Glasgow Royal
Mental Hospital
Gartnavel Royal Hospital
Gartnavel Royal Hospital is a mental health facility based in the west end of Glasgow, Scotland. It provides inpatient psychiatric care for the population of the West of the City; covering Hillhead, Partick, Scotstoun, Yoker, Clydebank, Drumchapel, Bearsden and Milngavie...
.
In 1933 he married Jean Rankine, a competitive tennis player and Lecturer
Lecturer
Lecturer is an academic rank. In the United Kingdom, lecturer is a position at a university or similar institution, often held by academics in their early career stages, who lead research groups and supervise research students, as well as teach...
in Mathematics at Glasgow, and together they would have three sons and one daughter.
In 1936, he moved to Massachusetts to become director of the research division at Worcester State Hospital, and from 1939 to 1943 he was professor of neurology and psychiatry at Albany Medical College in Albany, New York, and at the Russell Sage School of Nursing, also in the Albany area. During those years, Cameron began to expand on his thoughts about the interrelationships of mind and body, and developed a reputation as a psychiatrist who could bridge the gap between the organic, structural neurologists, and the psychiatrists whose knowledge of anatomy was limited to maps of the mind as opposed to maps of the brain. Through his instruction of nurses and psychiatrists he became known as an authority in his areas of concentration.
Cameron focused primarily on biological descriptive psychiatry and applied the British and European schools and models of the practice. Cameron followed these schools of psychiatry in demanding that mental disturbances were diseases and are somatic in nature. All psychological illness were thus hardwired and a product of the body and the direct result of the patients biological structure rather than caused by social, societal or family relationships. The characteristics were thus diagnosed as syndromes, emerging from the brain. It is at this juncture that Cameron began to more and more interested with how he could effectively manipulate the brain in order to control and understand the processes of memory. Cameron furthermore, wanted to understand the problems of memory caused by aging. He believed that the aged brain suffered from psychosis and thus would need to prematurely age brains in order to observe the effect.
In 1936, Cameron published his first book, Objective and Experimental Psychiatry. It introduced his lifelong belief that psychiatry should strive to approach the study of human behavior in a rigorous, scientific fashion. Clearly rooted in biology, his theories of behavior stressed the unity of the organism with the environment. He outlines the experimental method and the research design. Cameron believed firmly in clinical psychiatry and a strict scientific method.
World War II
"It is not simply against future conspiracies of evil men which we have to guard ourselves but it is against ourselves, against our weaknesses and faults in our own social order, in our own ways of living against which we have to be on continual guard." - Donald Ewen CameronIn 1943, during World War II, Cameron returned to Canada. Cameron was invited to McGill University in Montreal at the urgings of the world-famous neurosurgeon, Wilder Penfield. There, with a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, money from J.D. McConnell of the Montreal Star, and a gift of the mansion of Sir Allan on Mount Royal, the Allan Memorial Institute was founded. For the next twenty-one years, Cameron's vision, determination, and adroit political maneuvering led to the astounding growth of the Institute. Cameron recruited Psychiatrists from Europe and around the world to build the psychiatry program at McGill. The team included psychoanalysts, social psychiatrists and biologists. Cameron developed a network of psychiatric services for Montreal.
In 1945 because of his reputation as a psychiatrist and the success of his instituting of psychiatric programs throughout Canada, the United States and Europe, Cameron was invited to Nuremberg to evaluate Rudolph Hess. This was an opportunity for Cameron to represent the new system and networks of psychiatry that he had instituted in Canada. He was joined at Nuremberg by the Soviets, Krasnushkin, Sepp and Kurshakov, Lord Moran, Rees and Riddoch from England; Lewis, Schroeder and himself from North America; and Professor Delay from France. In Germany, Cameron observed and recorded the methods utilized in the war, such as tortures, authority, powerlessness, individual motivations of prisoners and guards, and that the behaviors could be monitored by social scientists that were brave enough to look at the conditions experienced by those who suffered through torture and murder during World War II and with a concentration on Rudolph Hess' human experiments. Cameron was asked to assess both Hess' experiments and his sanity.
Before his arrival in Nuremberg Cameron wrote a paper titled The Social Reorganization of Germany. Cameron argued that German culture and its individual citizens would have to be transformed and reorganized. His analysis of German culture was that it is made up of people who had the need for status, that they worshiped strict order and regimentation, desired authoritarian leadership and had a hostile fear of other countries. The paper continued to state that German culture and its people will have offspring that in 30 years from 1945, would be the biggest threat to world peace. As a consequence the West would have to take measures to reorganize German society to prevent the coming of the offspring that would threaten world peace and order. Cameron focused on destroying the social organization of Germany which throughout history had repeatedly given birth to fearsome aggression. Cameron wanted to remove the social order of Germany that continually gave rise to the monstrosities of World War II. His arguments made it precisely a problem particular to the people of Germany and of the German race. Other psychiatric diagnoses of Germany took place at the same time such as Richard Max Brickner's, Is Germany Incurable(1943), Paul Winkler's, The thousand-year conspiracy: secret Germany behind the mask(1943), Fredrick Martin Stern, The Junker Meanace(1945), Sebastian Haffner's, Germany: Jekyll and Hyde: An Eyewitness Analysis of Nazi Germany(1941) and Sigrid Lillian Schultz, Germany will try it again(1944). Along with Cameron's own testament to the experiences of life in World War II Germany, these texts gave the West both a historical and psychological picture of the Germans and the German race. Brickner asked the newly formed United Nations to look at Germany as "the ward of the world". It was Cameron's expertise in biological psychiatric practice that was able to win the interpretation of the necessary measures to enforce against the German people after World War II and to be applied by the allied occupying forces in Germany. Furthermore, it is through Cameron's expertise at the Nuremberg trials and the Red Cross, that we are given the knowledge of the Medical regime in Germany during World War II. Cameron's purpose in Germany was to make sure that the country would never rise as a military threat after the war. In short, it was left to Donald Ewen Cameron to be the expert to tell the world what race of people could be likely to commit the crimes of WWII. He would be the one with authority to determine who made the crimes.
After Nuremberg
After Nuremberg Cameron published the text titled Nuremberg and Its Significance. In this Cameron hoped to accomplish a suitable method to re-instate a form of justice in Germany that could organize society to keep it from recreating the German that was born before and during World War II. Cameron viewed German society throughout history as continually giving rise to fearsome aggression. He came up with the idea that if he confronted the world and the Germans with the atrocities committed during the war, the World and the Germans would refrain from what were their repeated acts of extreme aggression. If the common population of Germany saw the atrocities of World War II they would surely submit to the re-organized system of justice that Cameron had created because the evidence at Nuremberg proved the Germans to be guilty. It was Cameron's expertise in psychiatry that decided both the presence or absence of German psychosis and the world's verdict of the Germans being guilty for World War II and the atrocities committed. Without Cameron and the others on the Nuremberg Jury and Trials, the agents who exactly committed the atrocities would not be clear. Cameron would decide that it was the German who would be most likely to commit the atrocities due to their historical, biological, racial and cultural past and their particular psychological nature. All Germans on trial would be assessed according to the likeliness for committing the crime. All accused were German and Cameron's expertise in understanding the psychiatric nature of Germans was utilized to discover guilt. It was Cameron's responsibility for portraying to the world that the events and atrocities did occur and they were committed by the Germans and it was his expertise that would distinguish between a German, the threat, and non-German, non-threat. Cameron's authority as a psychiatrist allowed him to reveal to the world what had truly happened and it is by his authority that the world is given a picture of World War II. As a result Cameron diagnosed Germany as the race most likely to rise and commit atrocities again because of their inherent nature. Cameron began to develop broader theories of society, developed new concepts of human relations to replace the psychiatric concepts of old that were deemed as dangerous and outdated. These became the basis of a new social and behavioral science that Cameron would later institute through his presidencies of the Canadian, American and World Psychiatric Associations, the American Psychopathological Association and the Society of Biological Psychiatry. With the results of the Manhattan project, Cameron feared that without proper re-organization of society atomic weapons could fall into the hands of new fearsome aggressors. Cameron argued that it was necessary for behavioral scientists to act as the social planners of society and that the United Nations could provide a conduit for implementing his ideas for applying psychiatric elements to global governance and politics.Cameron started to distinguish populations between the weak and the strong. Those with anxieties or insecurities, those who had trouble with the state of the world were labeled as the weak. Those with social problems and issues, those who could not cope with life, had to be isolated from society by the strong. The mentally ill were then labeled not only as sick but as weak. Cameron further argued that the weak must not influence children. He promoted a philosophy where chaos could be prevented by removing the weak from society. This resembles the sociobiology of the late 19th and early 20th century and the emerging psychiatric understanding of the entirety of society. People needed to be known through psychiatric analysis in order to thwart a violent and chaotic society.
Social and Intrapsychic Behavior Analysis
In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Cameron continued his work on memory and its relationship to aging. He published a book called Remembering and extended psychiatric links to human biology. In papers published during this time he linked RNA, a ribonucleic acid that is key component in the construction of DNA, to memory. He furthered his diagnostic definitions of clinical states such as anxiety, depression and schizophrenia as well demonstrating his commitment to the importance of the psychiatric clinic as the correct form for understanding what is known as mental illness. Cameron's dedication to clinical psychiatry was examined in his pedagogical writings, his establishing of new organizations of clinical services, his papers and manuals that contributed to psycho-therapeutic practice. He began to develop the discipline of social psychiatry that concentrated and examined the roles of interpersonal interaction, family, community and culture in the emergence and amelioration of emotional disturbance. Cameron invented the day hospital, where patients could visit a psychiatrist during the day and return home at night. He placed the psychiatric treatment unit inside of the hospital and inspected its success. Here in the hospital Cameron could observe how the psychiatric patient resembled patients with other disease that were not psychiatric in nature. Through the comparison somatic causes could also be compared. The behavior of a mental patient could resemble the behavior of a patient with for example syphilis and then a somatic cause could be deduced for a psychological illness. Cameron title this procedure "intrapsychic" and was derived from the psycho-somatic relationship of hospital patients. Cameron began to refuse the Freudian unconscious in favor of a social constructivist's view of mental illness. Cultural and society played a crucial role in the ability for one to function according to the demands necessary for human survival. Personality development depended on the individual's ability to adapt to society. Methods must be developed to construct a society where the weak or the less able would be removed from society. Those more likely to disrupt society would need to be confined and reorganized to cope with societal conditions. Society should function to select out the weak and unwanted, those apt towards fearsome aggression that threatened society. A psychiatric society could provide he necessary mechanism to eliminate unwanted behavioral patterns and characteristics. Psychiatry would play a disciplinary role. Cameron began to explore how industrial conditions could satisfy the population through work and what kind of person or worker is best suited to industrial conditions. A stronger personality would be able to maintain himself or herself in heavy industrial situations and the weaker would not be able to cope with industrial conditions. Cameron would analyze what conditions produced the stronger worker, what would be the necessary conditions to replicate this personality and to reward the stronger while disciplining the weaker. In his 1946 paper entitled Frontiers of Social Psychiatry used the case of World War II Germany as an example where society poisoned the minds of citizens by creating a general anxiety or neurosis.Cameron and Freud: Civilization and Discontents
Although Cameron rejected the Freudian notion of the unconscious, he shared the Freudian idea in that personal psychology is linked to the nervous nature of the human. Anxieties could be generated or terminated by the institutions and mechanism of society. Our wants and desires are malleable and limited to the biological aptness of the citizen. The transmissions of attitudes, beliefs, and ways of managing life, should reinforce the overall attitudes of the desired society. Like Freud, Cameron maintained that the family was the nucleus of social behavior and our anxieties later in life were spawned during childhood. Through the understanding of one's childhood Cameron believed we could see the root cause of mental illness. Cameron wanted to build a psychiatric institution that was inventive in order to determine rapid ways for societal control while demanding a psychological economy that did not center itself around guilt and guilty complexes. His focus on children included the rights to protection against outmoded, indoctrination tactics, and the necessity for the implantation of taboos and inhibitions from their parents. Cameron described that adult insecurities, chronic anxieties, frigidity, feelings of inadequacy, were transmissions down through generations and were matters of family and society. Cameron believed that new methods must be developed in order to stop the repetition of mental weakness, inadequacies, and illness. He stipulated that the re-occurrence of mental illness could be stopped by remodeling and expanding the present concepts of marriage suitability and the quarantine of individuals who are suffering from mental illness and disease from the general population. By preventing people with mental illness and disease from marriage, the dominate society who establish institutions of social control, can prevent the reproduction of mentally ill children and spreading the social ramifications to others. Thus, unlike Freud's Oedipalization, Cameron believed mental sickness to be hereditary, hardwired, and that social problems were problems of genetics. Society would have to be organized to single out, create environments where psychological disorders could be easily identified and remove the mentally ill from the domestic processes of marriage and child birth. Society would have to be cured, by removing the mentally ill from cities, towns, villages and common life in general. Society could be purified or healed by the active quarantine of the mentally disagreeable, that for Cameron, can be identified according to genetic characteristics and race. Those with genetics more susceptible to mental illness and disagreeable to the given political, economical and ideological basis for society were fit for quarantine as a preemptive or prevention of future mental infection of society. Social and moral deviance was thus in fact for Cameron, a matter of biological reduction and determination, not entirely the fault of society. Sickness was in fact somatic rather than socially constructed, however, society's problems resulted from its lack of the necessary institutions for removing the mentally sick from society, we haven't begun to be able to use psychiatric diagnostic methods to identify the sick. The only cure for mental illness was to eliminate its carriers from society all together. Society would fail and give a picture of discontent as long as the mentally deviant lived with society, not from some need for the expression or repression of unconscious drives. Society was thus constructed by its members, but the members that should be constructing society, through marriage, children, and authority, had to be men and women that lived without the contamination of mental illness and moral deviance. Society itself, for Cameron, had to become psychiatric, that is, a force that could remove the mentally ill from everyday life. Cameron hoped his theories would make the mentally ill more visible and provide the necessary accreditation, knowledge and information to create a group standard for necessary authority, the future doctors of psychiatry and the people who respected and utilized their power and dominance. Cameron's theories of psychiatric power were not only installed in doctors offices but were the basis for police practice in identifying and removing mentally ill people and possible criminals. Cameron's theories were just as much about the ambulance as they were about the police car.For Cameron, political and national agendas reflected the genetics of a race of people, therefore, politics and nationalities were genetically based and societies that selected for the political and social aptness, were selecting the right genes. For example Cameron might suggest immigration policies and those immigration policies would be selecting for the correct genes, for political inclinations were an expression of genetics. For Cameron, mental conditions and illnesses were contagious and mechanism in society could both prevent and cause mental illness. If one came into contact with something or someone known to cause mental illness, was a sign one would begin to produce the symptoms of a mental disease. For example something like rock music could be created by mentally ill people and would produce mentally disturbed or ill people through infection which in turn would be transmitted to the genes. Thus this group would have to be studied and controlled as a contagious social disease. Although, mental illness is genetic, environmental factors can transform genes through infection. Coming into contact with the mentally ill, without proper authority, results in an infection of mental disease. Police, Hospitals, Government, and Schools, would need to utilize the correct psychiatric authority to stop mental contagions from spreading. Cameron hoped also to generate families capable of utilizing authority and techniques to take measures against mental illness, this would come to be apparent in Cameron's MK Ultra and Delta experiments. Everyday people would learn to help police and quarantine the aspects and persons of society deemed as leading to mental illness. Inside hospitals nurses would be given the authority to establish the mental characteristics of the parents and the new born baby, in terms of genetic, national and racial orientation as well as the personal histories of the parents. This is part of Donald Ewen Cameron's contribution of psychiatric authority to contemporary hospital practice in society and is closely linked to some hospital practices of forced sterilization. Cameron's idea for a societal cure differs from Freud's, where Freud proposed a talking cure, Cameron did not believe in a cure but a form of quarantine and extermination. Cameron wanted better societal functions, to expose mental deficiencies, environments that might frustrate the mentally weak, however help to reinforce the authority of the psychiatric society. Where Freud saw symptoms of repression, Cameron saw genetic weakness, biological determination and symptoms of social contamination as causes for mental illness. Cameron's elemental construction of society is not based on repression or the unconscious, id, ego and superego, but is socio-biologically determined as founded on genetics. Cameron's own use of authority, discipline and control is not seen as any materialization of an unconscious drive. However, it is unclear how Ewen Cameron's own Presbyterian upbringing, the fact that his own Father was a minister, may have factored into his psychiatric theory on social deviance.
Dr. Cameron and the "Germans"
"If we can succeed in inventing means of changing their attitudes and beliefs, we shall find ourselves in possession of measures which, if wisely used, may be employed in freeing ourselves from their attitudes and beliefs in other fields which have greatly contributed to the instability of our period by their propensity for holding up progress" - Cameron on the "Germans" in, Life is For LivingIn Cameron's book Life is For Living, published in 1948 he expressed a concern for the German Race in general. Just as the French Sigrid Lillian Schultz's stated in, Germany will try it again, Cameron fostered a fear for Germans and that they are genetically determined. In Life is for living Cameron continued developing his fears and concerns around Germans. The Germans that were affected by the events that would lead to World War II were of utmost concern. Cameron's own anxieties were extended to his policies determining who should have children and be able to excel to authority positions. Naturally, according to Cameron's psychiatric analysis of the German race, the Germans were not suitable to have children or hold positions of authority in society because of their genetic tendency of organizing society towards one that fosters fearsome aggression and would lead to war rather than peace. Cameron would repeatedly utilize the German as the archetypal character structure on which to ground the most psychologically deviant of human races.
Mental Illness as a Social Contagion
For Cameron, although society had established sanctions against the spread of infectious diseases, he wanted to extend the concept of contagion to chronic anxiety that had plagued society. He warned that people with mental illnesses, who had not been quarantined, could spread and transmit their disease to portions of the populations. Government institutions should take measure against these people as possible liabilities. Cameron began to base some of his notions on race, as is seen in his relationship to the German.In the late 1940s, Cameron presented his ideas in a lecture entitled, Dangerous Men and Women. In it he described various personalities that he believed were of marked danger to society. The individuals he described were dangerous to all members of society including children. The first type that Cameron describes is a passive man who "is afraid to say what he really thinks", "he will stand anything, and stands for nothing", and Cameron gives him a racial and national distinction, "he was born in Munich, he is the eternal compromiser and his spiritual food is appeasement" The second type is a possessive type; filled with jealousy and demand utmost loyalty. Those who are in danger of this person are those closest to them; the affect on children can be devastating. The third type is the insecure man, "They are the driven crowds that makes the army of the authoritarian overlord; they are the stuffing of conservatism ... mediocrity is their god. They fear the stranger, they fear the new idea; they are afraid to live, and scared to die." This third type need conformity and obey the dictates of society, much as the German who worships authority, this type create a world of strict right or wrong which is manipulated by power groups to keep the insecure under control and dependent, and this type for its lust for authority is dangerous. The last type is the psychopath the greatest danger in times of political and societal upheaval; this he merely called "the Gestapo". Cameron believed that a society where psychiatry built and developed the institutions of government, schools, prisons, and hospitals would be one where science triumphs over these sick members of society. Cameron demanded that political systems had to be watched and the German needed to be monitored due to its personality type which results in the conditions that give rise to dictatorial power of an authoritarian overlord. The German always lusted for a master. Cameron stated "Get it understood how dangerous these damaged, sick personalities are to ourselves - and above all, to our children, whose traits are taking form and we shall find ways to put an end to them." He spoke about Germans, but also to the larger portion of the society that resembled or associated with such traits. For Cameron the traits were contagions and anyone affected by the societal, cultural or personality forms would themselves be infected. Cameron utilized his ideas to implement policies on who should govern and who should parent in society. The described types would have to be eliminated from society in order for there to be peace and progress. The sick were in fact, for Cameron, the viral infection to its stability and health. The described types were the enemies of society and life. Experts must develop methods of forcefully changing attitudes and beliefs, in order to prevent the authoritarian overlord.
Project MKULTRA
Donald Ewen Cameron is best known for his MK-ULTRA-related mind-control and behavior modification research for the CIA. Cameron was President of the American Psychiatric Association in 1952-1953.Cameron lived and worked in Albany, New York
Albany, New York
Albany is the capital city of the U.S. state of New York, the seat of Albany County, and the central city of New York's Capital District. Roughly north of New York City, Albany sits on the west bank of the Hudson River, about south of its confluence with the Mohawk River...
, and was involved in experiments in Canada
Canada
Canada is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean...
for Project MKULTRA
Project MKULTRA
Project MKULTRA, or MK-ULTRA, was the code name for a covert, illegal CIA human experimentation program, run by the CIA's Office of Scientific Intelligence. This official U.S. government program began in the early 1950s, continued at least through the late 1960s, and used U.S...
, a United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
based CIA-directed mind control
Mind control
Mind control refers to a process in which a group or individual "systematically uses unethically manipulative methods to persuade others to conform to the wishes of the manipulator, often to the detriment of the person being manipulated"...
program which eventually led to the publication of the KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation manual.
Naomi Klein
Naomi Klein
Naomi Klein is a Canadian author and social activist known for her political analyses and criticism of corporate globalization.-Family:...
states in her book "The Shock Doctrine
The Shock Doctrine
The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism is a 2007 book by Canadian author Naomi Klein, and is the basis of a 2009 documentary by the same name....
" that Dr Cameron's research and his contribution to the MKUltra project was actually not about mind control and brainwashing, but "to design a scientifically based system for extracting information from 'resistant sources.' In other words, torture
Torture
Torture is the act of inflicting severe pain as a means of punishment, revenge, forcing information or a confession, or simply as an act of cruelty. Throughout history, torture has often been used as a method of political re-education, interrogation, punishment, and coercion...
.", and citing a book from Alfred W. McCoy
Alfred W. McCoy
Alfred William McCoy is a historian of Southeast Asia. He is the J.R.W. Smail Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. McCoy graduated from the Kent School in 1964. He earned his B.A...
it further says that "Stripped of its bizarre excesses, Dr. Cameron's experiments, building upon Dr. Donald O. Hebb's earlier breakthrough, laid the scientific foundation for the CIA's two-stage psychological torture method."
It was during this era that Cameron became known worldwide as the first chairman of the World Psychiatric Association as well as president of the American and Canadian psychiatric associations. Cameron had also been a member of the Nuremberg medical tribunal in 1946–47.