Draft:Norman A. Cameron

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Norman Alexander Cameron (1896 – 1975) was a behavioral psychologist, medical doctor and psychiatrist. He developed a theory about paranoia, the "paranoid pseudo-community."[1] This theory was recently used to explain an online paranoia called gangstalking. [2]

Early life

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Norman Cameron was born on 24 April 1896 in Quebec, Canada.[3] The family moved to Southampton, England and then to New York City.[3] The family experienced poverty and Cameron left high school without graduating, to work and support his family.[3] Throughout his life, he experienced poor health due to tuberculosis; in 1927 he was bedridden for two years due to a pulmonary hemorrhage.[4] Loewald states that Cameron's personal experiences of poverty, illness and lack of educational opportunity, contributed to his social psychology theories.[3]

Education

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Cameron received an undergraduate degree from the University of Michigan in 1923 at age 27.[5] He received a PhD in behavioral psychology from the University of Michigan in 1927.[5] From 1929 to 1933, he completed two years of medical school at University of Wisconsin and two more years at John Hopkins Medical School, receiving his MD in 1933 at age 37.[4]

In the 1950s, Cameron began psychoanalytic training at the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis.[4] He continued his training at the Western New England Psychoanalytic Institute.[4] He finished analytic training in 1959, at age 63.[3]

Career

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From 1933 to 1938, Cameron was an intern, resident and staff physician at John Hopkins[6] In 1939, he became a professor of psychiatry in the medical school at the University of Wisconsin.[3] He also was the Psychiatry Department Chair in the Medical School for many years.[3] In 1953, he left the University of Wisconsin to become a Research Professor of Psychiatry at Yale University.[7]

Norman Cameron’s theory development and published papers

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Cameron proposed and developed the concept of paranoid pseudo-community in stages.[8]” Cameron theorized that children who are neglected, abused or traumatized do not learn the social skills to participate in a positive adult community.[9] Cameron proposed that if a positive community was not available, people might create a paranoid belief that a negative “paranoid pseudo-community” exists, containing people united against them.[10]

Cameron was a PhD in behaviorist psychology and utilized social psychology theories.[4] From 1950 to 1960, the social psychology model was a mainstream approach, focused on how biological, psychological and social factors contributed to mental illness.[11] Cameron’s paranoid pseudo-community theory was included in major psychology textbooks.[12] However, in the 1960s as psychotropic medications were developed, the field of psychology shifted to a medical model, replacing the biosocial approaches to mental illness.[11]

In 1943, Cameron described the development of “paranoic” or paranoid thinking, using the concept of paranoid pseudo-community.[9] Cameron proposed that paranoid thinking resulted from an individual’s childhood social environment and social interactions. He stated “delusion is a disorder of interpretation”.[9] He concluded that the child’s social environment is important because there are frequent misunderstandings in everyday life. Cameron stated children should be taught to consider other people’s perspectives, because adults who do not learn social skills can misunderstand social situations and become uncompromising, which can result in paranoid thinking.[9]

Cameron stated if people with paranoid thinking cannot shift perspective, they may become inflexible and brood about situations.[9] They create a hypothetical pseudo-community built up of objective persons with imaginary functions.[9] After brooding for some time, they may take aggressive measures such as becoming angry or confronting others.[9] Cameron states that to outsiders these angry outbursts appear to be the sudden onset of a mental disorder, but the person’s internal perceptions and reactions have been building up for a long period of time.[9]

Later in 1943, Cameron wrote a second paper describing the paranoid pseudo-community in more detail.[13] He referenced his earlier studies of communication and stated the importance of language skills, because discussion helps people understand different perspectives.[1] In contrast, paranoid people are often more suspicious and sensitive to slights, but due to inadequate language skills, they cannot talk through their suspicions with other people.[1] They become preoccupied with collecting incidents, creating a cycle of narrowing down their personal outside interests and isolating themselves from social interactions.[1] As they collect more data, they start to believe these incidents indicate a plot.[1] During this process, paranoid individuals undergo a progressive de-socialization, developing metonymy (asocial idioms – or a specialized language) and asyndesis (the lack of explicit functional links in thinking) making communication with other people increasingly difficult.[1]

The paranoid person may try to seek reassurance from others, but fail, due to their poor social and language skills combined with the complexity of their delusional system.[1] Other people cannot follow the person’s delusional narrative, so they respond by arguing against the delusion or dismissing it as absurd.[1] These responses convince the paranoid person that the layperson is an enemy or part of the plot.[1] Gradually the paranoid person “unintentionally organizes” a negative pseudo-community which “grows until it seems to constitute so grave a threat” that the person “bursts into defensive or vengeful activity”.[1]

Cameron states the real community responds “with forcible restraint or retaliation, depending upon whether it recognizes this outburst as illness or wickedness”.[1] These negative reactions solidify the paranoid person’s belief that an actual negative pseudo-community exists.[1]

In 1947, Cameron wrote his first book The Psychology of Behavior Disorders: A Biosocial Interpretation.[14] This book included a chapter about paranoia using the concepts from his 1943 papers. In 1951, Cameron and coauthor Ann Magaret wrote the book Behavior Pathology.[15] The introduction explained the authors’ biosocial approach of comparing and contrasting normal and pathological reactions to “understand the patient as an individual who has a given hereditary make-up and a unique history of fortunate as well as unfortunate social learning”.[15] In Chapter 13 on Pseudo-community and Delusion and Chapter 15 on Disorganization, Cameron and Magaret defined the process by which patients create a paranoid pseudo-community.

In 1959, while he was in psychoanalytic training, Cameron revised his concept of paranoid pseudo-community to include “individual aspects” and “the evidence of internal changes”.[10] In this paper, Cameron stated that paranoid delusions could be positive.[10] Cameron stated that paranoid delusions connected the patient's inner reality to the social reality of others. He also incorporated the psychoanalytic concepts of denial and projection as primitive defenses to explain paranoia. Cameron formulated a five-step process in the creation of a paranoid pseudo-community:[10]

  1. Experiences of frustration cause the paranoid individual to withdraw from his surroundings and take refuge in fantasy and daydreams. This results in a loss of connection with social reality.
  2. The individual attempts to recover his lost reality, but lacks the ego strength or high-level defenses to accomplish this task. Because he cannot repress his primitive conflicts, he denies and projects them. He then perceives these projections as threats from outside of him.
  3. Due to poor socialization in childhood, paranoid individuals tend to be egocentric in orientation and have a tendency to self-reference. Because he is frightened by the perceived threats from outside, he is likely to notice small actions of other people and regard them as threatening.
  4. The individual begins to create hypotheses to explain what is happening. He may go through several hypotheses before settling on one hypothesis as an imperfect way to reconstruct a version of reality. Cameron stated: “a distorted world is better than no world at all” because even a distorted world allows an individual to avoid personality disintegration.[10]
  5. If the person succeeds in creating a pseudo-community, this can be positive because the pseudo-community provides an explanation of their strangely altered world and provides a basis for action.

Cameron concluded that the creation of a pseudo-community is helpful because it reconnects the patient with reality and it absorbs the patient's internal aggressive conflicts.[10] However creating a pseudo-community is negative and not helpful because the patient now has a justification for aggressive action against actual people.[10] Cameron recommended the first interventions in therapy should focus on reducing the patient’s anxiety by alleviating biosocial and environmental stressors.[10] He stated therapy could help, if the therapist was trustworthy, not made anxious by the patient’s fear and hostility, not driven to give false reassurances or make demands and was able to remain neutral and interested.[10]

In 1963, Cameron wrote his third book Personality Development and Psychopathology: A Dynamic Approach, with the goal of exploring “the inner life of man” from a psychodynamic perspective.[16] As in his previous writings, he emphasized the important role of early childhood and parenting in personality development. He stated that language skills, empathy and social skills were important life tools.[16] Using a psychoanalytic viewpoint, he expanded the five-step model of the paranoid pseudo-community.[16] He stated paranoia was an attempt to restore and reconstruct reality in order to ward off a possible psychotic regression. He listed the positive aspects of paranoid pseudo-community as:[16]

  • It provides a logical explanation for the patient’s sudden traumatic anxiety and sense of ego disorganization.
  • It provides an outlet for the patient’s aggression, so aggression is not turned against the self.
  • The patient must engage in higher-level secondary thinking to outmaneuver the actions of the pseudo-community.
  • As the patient tries to counteract and outmaneuver the pseudo-community, these actions encourage increased orientation to reality through contact with real people.

Cameron’s last published writing about paranoia was in a psychiatry textbook.[17] He summarized the various theories about paranoia beginning with the Greeks. Cameron stated the importance of childhood and trust:[17]

"Patients who develop paranoid reactions are probably persons who in early childhood were unsuccessful in developing basic trust . . . a basic confidence, derived from innumerable experiences during infancy and early childhood, that, whenever one’s frustration becomes intolerable, someone will relieve it and thus restore a tolerable equilibrium. The importance of such basic trust or basic confidence becomes immediately apparent when it is considered how completely helpless the infant or very young child is unless someone else reliably helps him".[17]

Connections to other theories

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Cameron’s 1963 concept that paranoia is a coping mechanism connects back to Johann Heinroth’s theories from the 1800s[18] and to current theories of mental illness as a coping mechanism for disenfranchised people, or “madness as strategy”.[19] Cameron’s theories about the importance of childhood socialization connect to Lacan’s theories about early childhood, specifically “the name of the Father” developmental stage.[20] Cameron’s theories are also based on Jung’s theory that environmental and social factors cause paranoia. Jung stated that people with paranoia can “not adapt to the world” thus their delusions provide a “subjective reality” which helps them cope.[21]

Personal life

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Norman Cameron married Eugenia "Jean" Katz on 11-22-1922 in Toledo, Ohio. She was born on 8-5-1903 in Russia. Eugenia trained as a zoologist and later became a child psychiatrist.[3] They both were undergraduates at the University of Michigan from 1919 to 1923.[5] They did not have children. Crowley's obituary for Norman describes Eugenia as managing their daily life and providing care and support during his illnesses.[22]

Norman and Eugenia both graduated from John Hopkins Medical School, Norman in 1933 and Eugenia in 1934.[6] In 1936, they were both staff physicians at Johns Hopkins Hospital.[6] When Norman taught at the University of Wisconsin, Eugenia developed and supervised psychiatric services for the Wisconsin Child Guidance Centers. She published two papers related to child guidance.[23] [24] Loewald states that Eugenia died in 1972, during a voyage to London.[3] Norman died in 1975.[3]

References

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  1. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l Cameron, N (1943). "The paranoid pseudo-community". The American Journal of Sociology. 49 (4): 37. doi:10.1086/219306.
  2. ^ Johnston, L.B. (2024). Gangstalking: Academic Intersections and Ethical Issues. Ethics International Press Limited.
  3. ^ a b c d e f g h i j Loewald, H.W. (1976). "Norman A. Cameron, M.D. 1896-1975". The Psychoanalytic Quarterly. 45 (4): 616. doi:10.1080/21674086.1976.11926780. PMID 792934.
  4. ^ a b c d e Crowley, R. (1978). "Psychiatry, Psychiatrists, and Psychoanalysts: Reminiscences of Madison, Chicago and Washington-Baltimore in the 1930s". The Journal of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis and Dynamic Psychiatry. 6 (4): 557–567. doi:10.1521/jaap.1.1978.6.4.557. PMID 357360.
  5. ^ a b c "Alumni Files Index". Bentley Historical Library.
  6. ^ a b c [archives@jhmi.edu "Johns Hopkins University Archives"]. {{cite web}}: Check |url= value (help)
  7. ^ Loewald, H.W. (1976). "Norman A. Cameron, M.D. 1896-1975". The Psychoanalytic Quarterly. 45 (4): 614–617. doi:10.1080/21674086.1976.11926780. PMID 792934.
  8. ^ Cameron, Norman (1947). The Psychology of Behavior Disorders. Houghton Mifflin. p. 437.
  9. ^ a b c d e f g h Cameron, N. (1943). "The development of paranoic thinking". Psychological Review. 50 (2): 233. doi:10.1037/h0059990.
  10. ^ a b c d e f g h i Cameron, Norman (July 1959). "The paranoid pseudo-community revisited". American Journal of Sociology. 65 (1): 52–58. doi:10.1086/222626. JSTOR 2773620.
  11. ^ a b Deacon , 33(7), 846–861., B.J. (2013). "The biomedical model of mental disorder: A critical analysis of its validity, utility, and effects on psychotherapy research". Clinical Psychology Review. 33 (7): 846–861. doi:10.1016/j.cpr.2012.09.007. PMID 23664634.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link) CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
  12. ^ Coleman, J.C. (1950). Coleman,Abnormal Psychology and Modern Life. Scott Foresman.
  13. ^ Cameron, N (1943). "The paranoid pseudo-community". The American Journal of Sociology. 49 (4): 32–38. doi:10.1086/219306.
  14. ^ Cameron, N. (1947). The Psychology of Behavior Disorders. Houghton Mifflin. p. x.
  15. ^ a b Cameron, N.; Magaret, A. (1951). Behavior Pathology. Houghton Mifflin.
  16. ^ a b c d Cameron, N. (1963). Personality development and psychopathology : A dynamic approach. Houghton Mifflin Company. p. xi.
  17. ^ a b c Cameron, N. (1967). Psychotic disorders: Paranoid reactions Comprehensive textbook of psychiatry (1st ed.). Williams & Wilkins. pp. 665–675.
  18. ^ Steinberg ., H.; Herrmann-Lingen, C; Himmerich, H. (2013). "Johann Christian August Heinroth: psychosomatic medicine eighty years before Freud". Psychiatria Danubina. 25 (1): 11–16. PMID 23470601.
  19. ^ Garson, J. (2022). "The helpful delusion: Evidence grows that mental illness is more than dysfunction [online essay]". Aeon Essays.
  20. ^ Hill, P. (1997). Lacan for beginners. London: For Beginners.
  21. ^ Boechat, W. (2016). he Red Book of C.G. Jung: A journey into unknown depths. Karnac Books. p. 125.
  22. ^ Crowley, R (1979). "A memorial: Norman Alexander Cameron, Ph.D. M.D.". The Journal of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis and Dynamic Psychiatry. 7 (3): 469–472. doi:10.1521/jaap.1.1979.7.3.469. PMID 378917.
  23. ^ Cameron, E.S. (1946). "Mental health problems in school". The Journal of School Health. 16 (2): 43–45. doi:10.1111/j.1746-1561.1946.tb08468.x. PMID 21012535.[AI-generated?]
  24. ^ Cameron, E.S. (1948). "Child guidance services in semi-rural and neglected areas". American Journal of Orthopsychiatry. 18 (3): 536–540. doi:10.1111/j.1939-0025.1948.tb05113.x. PMID 18872379.