Psychiatry, Psychiatrists, and Psychoanalysts: Reminiscences of Madison, Chicago and Washington-Baltimore in the 1930s*

Freud first impinged on my consciousness in 1923 when I was a student of the late Norman Cameron, at that time, a Watsonian behaviorist. One of his lectures, which were always stimulating, was on the id, superego, and the ego. He personalized the goings-on in “the unconscious” in such a way as to make them appear completely absurd, which to him they were. After all, he did not believe in consciousness, much less in “the unconscious”. Not long after, Cameron suffered a pulmonary hemorrhage. In his next two years in bed he read philosophy and psychoanalysis and was never the same after that. He went to medical school and became a well-known psychiatrist and psychoanalyst (Cameron, 1963).

While I was in Madison, a fellow graduate student in psychology, fresh from being an attendant on Sullivan's ward at Sheppard-Pratt Hospital, told me about Sullivan and the restoring to function of 80% of the young male acute schizophrenics admitted to his ward. This influenced me later in choosing a residency at Sheppard in 1934. Schizophrenia, even when the onset was acute, was deemed a chronic condition. Once a schizophrenic, always a schizophrenic. This is still believed by many today.