Alongside his private practice, a major element in his career has been the 30 years of work as a child, adolescent and adult psychoanalytic psychotherapist at the Portman Clinic in London, a National Health Service outpatient facility where he served as Chairman between 1991 and 1994. For eight years early in his career, he also worked at the Brent Consultation Centre (BCC; now the Brent Centre for Young People). He has taught, supervised and given papers in over 50 cities in Europe, Australia and the United States.  His 60 journal articles and book chapters have enquired into such subjects as violent behaviour in adolescents and adults, aggression, delinquency, the role of the father in pre-suicidal states of mind, fetishism, splitting of the ego, child sexual abuse, adolescent development, doubt, perversion, and horror film monsters.

Campbell was born in the US, and, some would say, took a circuitous route to becoming a psychoanalyst.  After earning his BA in history and politics from Williams College in Massachusetts, he discovered psychoanalysis at Union Theological Seminary (UTS) in New York City where he was influenced by the existentialist theologian Paul Tillich and the Christian contemplatives. After dropping out of UTS he moved to Washington, DC and started an analysis with Ralph Wadeson, which he financed first by his work as an actor, then as an administrator for Head Start, a federal programme of pre-school education for deprived children, and later as a director  for the Poverty Program’s education efforts in Washington, DC.  Although Campbell did not follow a typical route to a career as a psychoanalyst he is struck by the way the varieties of his experiences have consciously and unconsciously influenced his thinking and practice.

After gaining a Masters in Social Work he moved to London in 1969 to train as a child psychotherapist at the Anna Freud Centre (AFC; formerly the Hampstead Child Psychotherapy Course and Clinic) with Agi Bene as his training analyst. As soon as he completed the AFC training, he began the adult training at the Institute of Psychoanalysis (IoPA). Campbell chose two Independent analysts to supervise his IoPA training cases, and has since also been supervised by Kleinian analysts. This engagement with different schools of thought exemplifies his pluralistic attitude.  

In 1963 Campbell started working with ill adolescents at the Brent Consultation Centre (BCC), and the Portman Clinic, where he assessed and treated in psychoanalytic psychotherapy violent and delinquent patients and those suffering from a perversion.  
His AFC training equipped him with a grasp of child development.  Anna Freud’s book, The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence (1937), tapped into a long-held curiosity about the nature and function of character traits, symptoms, defences and relationships. Moses and Egle Laufer’s approach at the BCC informed his developmental perspective on adolescents. The work of Anne-Marie and Joseph Sandler provided him with a conflict-based understanding of pathology. Ever since his early days at the Portman and Brent, he has been interested in treating and thinking about conflict, aggression, violence, sexuality and perversion. His work at the Portman, which would span the next three decades, had a profound impact on his thinking and clinical practice, as did another analyst working there: Mervin Glasser.
At the Portman, Campbell was influenced by Mervin Glasser’s concept of the ‘core complex’, which describes a universal process taking place within an infant’s mind and throughout the life cycle as the human subject moves away from mother toward independence, only to be pulled back by anxieties about loss of the object and its own death.  These anxieties mobilise a wish to return to an idealised mother who promised safety, security and nurture.  However, the price to pay for this imagined state of fusional bliss was anxiety about engulfment and loss of identity, like a cube of sugar being dissolved in a cup of coffee.   This anxiety triggered a flight from mother and a repeat of the cycle.  Glasser referred to this dynamic as the core complex, which he thought is constantly at work within the infant and throughout the life cycle, and provokes two types of self-protective aggression - ruthless and sadistic – as a means of negotiating the annihilating anxieties of abandonment and engulfment associated with the core complex.

Another central focus of Campbell’s thinking is the body. In 2003 he wrote about the figure of the monster in horror films, in particular its appeal to adolescents, whose own bodies and minds are undergoing such anxiety-provoking transformations. He describes how the ‘body horror’ of some of these films depicted the deep-seated fears about the maturing body as a monstrous presence. In line with his interest in cinema, while president of the BPAS, he asked analyst Andrea Sabbadini to organise a film festival, which became the European Psychoanalytic Film Festival (epff). Campbell has contributed several  papers to these festivals and, separately, has written about the 2004 film Bullet Boy, and its depiction of violence, adolescent gang culture and shame in the absence of a father.  In 2017 Campbell brought together his long standing interest in suicide to write a book with Rob Hale entitled Working in the Dark: Understanding the pre-suicide state of mind.

In recent years, the place of self-analysis – practised by both analyst and patient – has grown in significance for Campbell. His paper Self-Reflection and the Development of an Interpretation (2017), describes his use of self-analysis in the course of one session, and the ways in which it helped him to make contact with his patient. Building upon Freud, Campbell considers self-analysis to be the analysis of one’s resistance to self-knowledge. In Campbell’s view, analysts have long been reluctant to acknowledge that mistakes are inevitable in the analytic process; and yet, by recognising and recovering from mistakes, they can become a valuable clinical tool. Campbell has learned that one can only acquire wisdom through experience; by facing up to mistakes, bearing failures and tolerating uncertainty.
Of great importance to Campbell is engagement with different ideas and schools of thought. He has edited two volumes (in press) of Mervin Glasser’s selected papers: Volume I Aggression and the Core Complex, and Volume II Sexuality and Sadism. He invited 18 colleagues from the three British analytic traditions to write reflections on selected  papers by Glasser. This effort to assemble different viewpoints attests to his belief in the value of plurality, which he sees as obliging one to truly learn about the ‘other’, rather than simply tolerating diversity. In this spirit, he is also part of a group of British and Italian analysts, who have met regularly for twenty years to discuss theory and clinical technique. In 2022 Campbell edited a book with Ronny Jaffe, an Italian colleague from Milan, of chapters by their Italian and British colleagues entitled:  When the Body Speaks:  A British and Italian dialogue, which encompasses the group’s diverse theoretical and clinical perspectives. Drawing together several of his major interests, his own paper centres on a young patient who became able to sublimate violent impulses through comic book illustration. In an earlier collaborative effort in 2005 he co-wrote a paper with Finnish analyst Henrik Enckell, Metaphor and the violent act, in which they examined how a breakdown of metaphor – a failure to symbolise – can lead to violent behaviour.

Over the course of his 50-year career many psychoanalysts have influenced Campbell beginning with his analyst in the United States, Ralph Wadeson, his training analyst in London, Agi Bene, and  Adam Limentani and Pearl King who supervised his IoPA training cases. A broad range of analytic thinkers have made an impact on him starting with Freud and his daughter Anna, then, at various times: Wilfred Bion, Ron Britton, Christopher Bollas, Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel, Henrik Enckell, Michael Feldman, Edward Glover, Rob Hale, Melanie Klein, Gregorio Kohon, Egle Laufer, Tom Ogden, Michael Parsons, Rosine Perelberg, Wilhelm Reich, Sara Rosenfeld, Joe and Anne-Marie Sandler, John Steiner, Robert Stoller and David Tuckett.  Consistently open to other ways of observing and thinking, Campbell makes use of whatever rings true; whatever adds to his understanding of patients and his capacity as a psychoanalyst.

Key Publications

Campbell, D. (In press) Volume I Aggression and the Core Complex: Mervin Glasser’s contributions to psychoanalysis. London: Routledge.

Campbell, D. (In press) Volume II Sexuality and Sadism: Mervin Glasser’s contributions to psychoanalysis. London: Routledge.

Campbell, D & Jaffe. R. (2020) When the Body Speaks: A British and Italian Dialogue. London: Rutledge. (In Press).

Campbell, D. (2017) Self-analysis and the development of an interpretation. Int. J. Psychoanal. 98:1275-1289.

Campbell, D. and Hale, R. (2017) Working in the Dark: Understanding the Pre-Suicide State of Mind. London: Routledge.

Campbell, D. (2016) The body and sublimation in a violent male offender. J. Child Psychotherapy, 42(3):285-301.

Campbell, D. (2014) Debt, shame and violence in adolescence: Reactions to the absent father in the film Bullet Boy. Int. J Psychoanal. 95: 1011-1020.

Campbell, D. (2008) The shame shield in child sexual abuse. In Shame and Sexuality, Ed. Pajaczkowska, D & Ward, I. London: Routledge, pp. 75-91.

Campbell, D. & Enckell, H. (2005) Metaphor and the violent act. Int. J. Psychoanal, 86(3): 801-823.

Campbell, D. (2003) Dario Argento’s Phenomena (1985): A psychoanalytic perspective on the horror film genre and adolescent development. In The Couch and the Silver Screen: Psychoanalytic reflections on European cinema. Ed. Sabbadini, A. Hove & New York: Brunner & Routledge. pp. 128-138.

Campbell, D. (1995) The role of the father in a pre-suicide state. Int. J. Psychoanal. 76:315-323.

Submitted on 1 July 2023