In January 1957, the CIA, via the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology, began funding Cameron at McGill's Allan Memorial Institute, $60,000 to 1960. Depatterning: chlorpromazine and barbiturate sleep, 20 to 22 hours daily, then intensive electroshock until the patient reached stage three, incontinent, mute, unable to swallow, blank. Then psychic driving: looped tapes, the patient's own recorded statements, played through pillow speakers up to 20 hours daily, some patients hearing a message up to half a million times. Esther Schrier's notes read considered completely depatterned. Outcomes: dysfunction, not reorganization; Cameron's own papers admit persisting trauma. The Agency's files were destroyed in 1973.
Whether Cameron knew the CIA funded him is unresolved, he died before exposure, and the record shows he applied for the grant as ordinary research. The system's design meant nobody had to know: the Agency kept deniability, the doctor kept his conscience, the patients kept the sleep room. The 1980s Canadian settlement acknowledged the government's role; survivors' suits ran for decades. The technique failed therapeutically and succeeded epistemically: it proved a mind could be unmade, if not remade.
The claim: psychic driving failed as medicine and succeeded as prophecy, the looped-message protocol is now the default interface of civilization, the same sentence, the same feed, speakers in the pillow renamed notifications, and Cameron's error was thinking repetition rebuilds a person when repetition actually just rebuilds the repetition. Verdict: the mechanism parallel is exact and the archive has documented its civilian versions across the psyop wing. The Allan closed its sleep room. The feed never sleeps. What the CIA could not do to one patient, the platform does to everyone: play the message until it feels like your own voice.
If the message plays half a million times and nothing rebuilds, what was the point of the erasure?