Ewen D. Cameron: Wechselwirkungen zwischen einem forschenden Psychiater und seinen professionellen wie auch gesellschaftlichen Kontexten

As early as in the 1930s the psychiatrist Ewen Cameron laid the organisational fundamentals for the reform of psychiatric hospitals, introduced the open-door system, and founded the worldwide first psychiatric day-hospital in 1946. He also developed an automated psychotherapy, called “psychic driving“; furthermore, he bundled the somatic treatments of his time (scientific context) to a new form of treatment that he called “depatterning”. His public image initially was determined by his charismatic personality, which received important honors; e.g. in 1961 he became the founding president of the World Psychiatric Association (WPA). Ten years after his death in 1967, when it became known that one of his research projects was covertly cofinanced by the CIA, he was stylized as the incarnation of brainwashing. The public concern with “brain-washing” and the mind control techniques of the CIA embedded in the societal atmosphere of the “cold war” with its conspiracy conjectures (societal context) changed fundamentally the posthumous image of Cameron. In a critical look back the fact remains that Cameron could have realized his research concepts in a clinical context that tolerated his research against the disease and emphasized this as opposed to the immediate suffering of the individual patient and, at the same time did not completely internalize the clear ethical regulations of the year 1948: the Nuremberg Codex, the World Medical Association‘s- Declaration of Geneva as well as the UN-Declaration of Human Rights. Furthermore, in his socially technical phantasies Cameron was in danger of leaving the socially oriented psychiatric care of mentally ill patients and of slipping down into a totalitarian ideology.