Donald Ewen Cameron
Donald Ewen Cameron | |
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Mind Control |
Donald Ewen Cameron ([1] was a Scottish-born psychiatrist. He is largely known today for his central role in unethical medical experiments, and development of psychological and medical torture techniques for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). He served as president of the American Psychiatric Association (1952–1953), Canadian Psychiatric Association (1958–1959),[2] American Psychopathological Association (1963),[3] Society of Biological Psychiatry (1965)[4] and the World Psychiatric Association (1961–1966).[5]
24 December 1901 – 8 September 1967)Cameron was involved in administering
Early life and career
Donald Ewen Cameron was born in
Cameron began his training in psychiatry at the
from 1926 to 1928 with a Henderson Research Scholarship.In 1928, Cameron left Baltimore for the Burghölzli, the psychiatric hospital of the University of Zurich, in Switzerland, where he studied under Hans W. Maier, the successor of Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler, who had significantly influenced psychiatric thinking.[10] There he met A. T. Mathers, Manitoba's principal psychiatrist, who convinced Cameron in 1929 to move to Brandon, the second largest city of Manitoba, Canada. Cameron stayed there for seven years and was made physician-in-charge of the Reception Unit of the Provincial Mental Hospital. He also organized the structure of mental health services in the western half of the province, establishing 10 functioning clinics; this model was used as the blueprint for similar efforts in Montreal and a forerunner of 1960s community health models.[citation needed]
In 1933, he married Jean C. Rankine, whom he had met while they were students at the University of Glasgow. She was a former captain of the Scottish field hockey team, a competitive tennis player,[11] and lecturer in mathematics at the University of Glasgow. They had four children; a daughter and three sons.
In 1936, he moved to Massachusetts to become director of the research division at Worcester State Hospital only 1 year later. In 1936, he also published his first book, Objective and Experimental Psychiatry which introduced his belief that psychiatry should approach the study of human behavior in a rigorous, scientific fashion rooted in biology. His theories of behavior stressed the unity of the organism with the environment; the book also outlined experimental method and research design. Cameron believed firmly in clinical psychiatry and a strict scientific method.
In 1938 he moved to Albany, New York, where he received his diplomate in psychiatry and thus was certified in psychiatry. From 1939 to 1943 he was professor of neurology and psychiatry at Albany Medical College, 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, developing 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 an authority in his areas of concentration.[citation needed]
Cameron focused primarily on biological
In 1943, Cameron was invited to
Nuremberg trials
In 1945, Cameron, Nolan D. C. Lewis and Paul L. Schroeder, colonel and psychiatrist, University College of Illinois, were invited to the Nuremberg trials for a psychiatric evaluation of Rudolf Hess. Their diagnosis was amnesia and hysteria, per a short commentary in the Journal of the American Medical Association.[14] Hess later confessed that he had faked the amnesia.[15]
Before his arrival in Nuremberg, Cameron had written The Social Reorganization of Germany, in which he argued that
Cameron next published Nuremberg and Its Significance. In this, he hoped to establish a suitable method to reinstate a form of justice in Germany that could prevent its society from recreating the attitudes that led it from the Great War to 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 presented the world and confronted the Germans with the atrocities committed during the war, the world and the Germans would refrain from repeated acts of extreme aggression.[citation needed]; if the greater population of Germany saw the atrocities of World War II, they would surely submit to a re-organized system of justice. Cameron decided that Germans would be most likely to commit 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.[citation needed]
Cameron began to develop broader theories of society, new concepts of human relations to replace concepts he deemed dangerous and outdated. These became the basis of a new social and behavioural science that he would later institute through his presidencies of the Canadian,
Cameron started to distinguish populations between "the weak" and "the strong". Those with anxieties or insecurities and who had trouble with the state of the world were labelled as "the weak"; in Cameron's analysis, they could not cope with life and had to be isolated from society by "the strong". The
Social and intrapsychic behaviour 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[18] and extended psychiatric links to human biology.[1] In papers published during this time he linked RNA to memory. He furthered his diagnostic definitions of clinical states such as anxiety, depression and schizophrenia.
He began to develop the discipline of social psychiatry which concentrated on the roles of interpersonal interaction, family, community and culture in the emergence and amelioration of emotional disturbance. Cameron 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 diseases that were not psychiatric in nature. In this manner, somatic causes could be compared. The behaviour of a mental patient could resemble the behaviour of a patient with, for example, syphilis, and then a somatic cause could be deduced for a psychological illness. Cameron titled this procedure "intrapsychic" (a term derived from the psycho-somatic relationship of hospital patients).
Cameron began to abandon the
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 itself in heavy industrial situations, he theorised, while 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", he 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.[19]
Cameron and Freud: civilization and discontents
Although Cameron rejected the Freudian notion of the unconscious, he shared the Freudian idea that personal psychology is linked to the nervous nature. He theorized that attitudes and beliefs should reinforce the overall attitudes of the desired society. Like Freud, Cameron maintained that the family was the nucleus of social behavior and anxieties later in life were spawned during childhood. Cameron wanted to build an inventive psychiatric institution to determine rapid ways for societal control while demanding a psychological economy that did not center itself around guilt and guilt complexes. His focus on children included the rights to protection against outmoded, doctrinaire tactics, and the necessity for the implantation of
Cameron believed that mental illness was literally contagious – that if one came into contact with someone with mental illness, one would begin to produce the symptoms of a mental disease. For example, something like
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 Living[20]
In Cameron's book Life is For Living, published in 1948, he expressed a concern for the German race in general. Just as Sigrid Schultz stated in Germany will try it again, Cameron fostered a fear for Germans and their genetic determination.[clarification needed] Those Germans affected by the events that led to World War II were of utmost concern. Cameron's concerns extended to his policies determining who should have children and advance to positions of authority. According to Cameron's psychiatric analysis of the German people, they were not suitable to have children or hold positions of authority because of a genetic tendency to organize society in a way that fostered fearsome aggression and would lead to war rather than peace; he would repeatedly use the German as the archetypal character structure on which to ground the most psychologically deviant humans.[citation needed][21]
Mental illness as a social contagion
Although society had established sanctions against the spread of infectious diseases, Cameron wanted to extend the concept of
In the late 1940s, Cameron presented his ideas in a lecture entitled Dangerous Men and Women. It describes various personalities that he believed were of marked danger to all members of society. The personality types are as follows:
- A passive man who "is afraid to say what he really thinks" and "will stand anything, and stands for nothing". "[H]e was born in Munich, he is the eternal compromiser and his spiritual food is appeasement".[22]
- A possessive type, filled with jealousy and demanding utmost loyalty. This personality type poses a danger to those closest to them, especially children.
- 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 needs conformity and obeys the dictates of society, adhering to a world of strict standards of right or wrong (which are manipulated by power groups to keep the insecure controlled and dependent). Cameron theorized that this type is dangerous because of its "lust for authority".[22]
- The last type is the psychopath, the greatest danger in times of political and societal upheaval; this Cameron labeled "the Gestapo".
Cameron believed that a society in which psychiatry built and developed the institutions of government, schools, prisons and hospitals would be one in which science triumphed over the "sick" members of society. He demanded that political systems be watched, and that German people needed to be monitored due to their "personality type", which he claimed results in the conditions that give rise to the dictatorial power of an authoritarian overlord.
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 used his ideas to implement policies on who should govern and parent in society. The described types would have to be eliminated from society if there was to be peace and progress. The sick were, 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 to prevent the authoritarian overlord.[22]
MKULTRA Subproject 68
During the 1950s and 1960s, Cameron's work attracted the interest of the
Cameron had hoped to correct
Sid Taylor stated that Cameron used
In 1980, the Canadian investigative news program
Naomi Klein states in her book The Shock Doctrine that Cameron's research and his contribution to MKUltra were not about mind control and brainwashing, but "to design a scientifically based system for extracting information from 'resistant sources.' In other words, torture."[35] She then cites Alfred W. McCoy: "Stripped of its bizarre excesses, Cameron's experiments, building upon Donald O. Hebb's earlier breakthrough, laid the scientific foundation for the CIA's two-stage psychological torture method."[36]
Cameron is the subject of Stephen Bennett's film Eminent Monsters (2020), which was funded by BBC Scotland and Creative Scotland.[37]
Whether or not Cameron was aware that funding for his experiments was coming from the CIA is unclear; it has been argued that he would have carried out the exact same experiments if funding had come from a source without ulterior motives.[6]
Death
Cameron died of a heart attack while hiking with his son in the Adirondack Mountains on September 8, 1967.[38]
See also
- Andrei Snezhnevsky
- Aziz al-Abub, a torture expert affiliated with Hezbollah who studied and replicated some of Cameron's torture techniques[39]
- Sidney Gottlieb
References
- ^ PMC 1843238.
- ^ "Past Presidents & Board Chairs". Canadian Psychiatric Association. Retrieved 10 October 2016.
- ^ "Presidents of the APPA". American PsychoPathological Association. Archived from the original on 5 November 2018. Retrieved 10 October 2016.
- ^ "Society of Biological Psychiatry 65th Annual Meeting Program Book (p. 14)" (PDF). Society of Biological Psychiatry. Archived from the original (PDF) on 24 December 2010. Retrieved 10 October 2016.
- ^ "World Psychiatric Association Chronology". World Psychiatric Association. Archived from the original on 19 May 2015. Retrieved 10 October 2016.
- ^ S2CID 57560528. Retrieved 6 March 2021.>
- ISBN 0593011422.
- PMID 4861213.
- ISSN 0368-315X.
- ISBN 9780887801594.
- The Argus. Melbourne, Vic. 26 August 1929. Archived from the originalon 2 December 2012.
- ISBN 9782980096341.
- ^ "Part-Time Mental Patients". Time. January 2, 1956. p. 28.
- .
- ISBN 0-261-63246-9.
- ^ Paul Weindling. John W. Thompson: Psychiatrist in the Shadow of the Holocaust. University Rochester Press, 2010. p. 85.
- ^ Father, Son and CIA by Harvey Weinstein p. 97.
- ^ Cameron, Donald Ewen. (1947). Remembering. Nervous and mental disease monograph series.
- ^ Father, Son and CIA by Harvey Weinstein p. 90
- ^ Father, Son and CIA by Harvey Weinstein p. 100
- OCLC 9321971.
- ^ a b c Father, Son and CIA by Harvey Weinstein p. 101
- ISBN 0812907736, 978-0812907735.
- . Retrieved August 24, 2016.
- ^ Shudel, Matt (August 31, 2008). "Doctor Looked After the Sick, And Looked Around for the CIA". The Washington Post.
- Montreal Gazette(Jan. 21, 1984).
- ^
ISBN 0812907736, 978-0812907735.
- ^ Turbide, Diane (1997-04-21). "Dr. Cameron's Casualties". Retrieved 2007-09-09.
- ISBN 1550139320.
- ^ Taylor, Sid (1992). "A History of Secret CIA Mind Control Research". Nexus. Retrieved August 24, 2016 – via all.net.
- The Fifth Estate(Mar. 11, 1980).
- ^ Collins, Anne (1988), In the Sleep Room: The Story of the CIA Brainwashing Experiments in Canada, Lester & Orpen Dennys
- ^ "The Sleep Room (1998)". IMDb. Retrieved 10 October 2016.
- ISBN 978-0880483636.
- Metropolitan Books, p. 39.
- Metropolitan Books, p. 41.
- ^ Bennett, Stephen (2020). When men become Monsters. Seven Days, Sunday National, 29 March 2020. pp. 1-2.
- ^ Stunning tale of brainwashing, the CIA and an unsuspecting Scots researcher, The Scotsman, January 5, 2006. Retrieved 13 January 2017.
- ISBN 1856491048.