Norman A. Cameron, M.D—1896-1975

Norman Alexander Cameron, eminent and widely known scholar and teacher in the fields of psychiatry and psychology, died on August 4, 1975, in solitude and melancholy, at the age of 79 in New Haven, Connecticut. He was born in Canada of Scottish ancestry, spent some of his childhood years in London, and later in New York. His family was poor and he had to interrupt his high school education. He never finished high school, later remarking that he was a school drop-out many years before this became fashionable. Nevertheless, he eventually was able to get a college education and to obtain his Ph.D. in psychology at the University of Michigan in 1927. Because of further interruptions in his educational career due to pulmonary tuberculosis, he did not receive his M.D. degree from the Johns Hopkins Medical School in Baltimore until 1933. His psychiatric training was at the Phipps Clinic of the Johns Hopkins Hospital, then under the leadership of Adolph Meyer. After serving as Chief Resident at the Phipps Clinic in 1936, at the age of forty, he taught at the University of Wisconsin, published a monograph, Reasoning, Regression and Communication in Schizophrenics in 1938, and was appointed Professor and Chairman of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin Medical School in 1947. His work in psychopathology during those years brought him into frequent contact and lively exchange of ideas with some of the Gestalt psychologists who had emigrated from Germany, among them Koehler and Koffka. In 1953 he accepted an appointment as Research Professor of Psychiatry at Yale, where he was able to devote most of his time to research and writing.

Already in his early fifties, while still in Wisconsin, he began his psychoanalytic training at the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis. When he moved to New Haven, he continued his