Meyer, Adolf 1866-1950

MEYER, ADOLF 1866-1950

A leader of american psychiatry

Psychobiology

Adolf Meyer was the leading non-Freudian psychiatric theorist in the United States. He was born on 13 September 1866 in Niederweningen, Switzerland, the son of a minister and the nephew of a doctor, and grew up in an atmosphere of liberalism and reflection. Meyer was trained in neurobiology and neurophysiology at the University of Zurich, where he received his M.D. degree in 1892. He had hoped for the post of assistant to the professor of medicine at Zurich, but when this was denied him he decided to go to the United States. His first appointment was as a pathologist at the Illinois Eastern Hospital for the Insane at Kankakee, Illinois. Meyer soon became acquainted with the work of psychologist William James, the philosopher-educator John Dewey, and others who were molding psychology and philosophy. He blended these different influences into a concept of human behavior that he called ergasiology or psychobiology, which sought to integrate the psychological and biological study of human beings.

The Phipps Clinic

In 1910 Meyer became a professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University. In 1914 he was named the first director of the Henry Phipps Psychiatric Clinic, a position he held until his retirement in 1941. Under his leadership the Phipps Clinic became one of the most important centers in the world for training psychiatrists. Rejecting the traditional view that separated the mind from the body, Meyer taught his students to be concerned with the whole human being. He rejected simple biological explanations of mental illness and worked to develop formulations of "reaction patterns." He argued for the individuality of the patient and suggested, for example, that schizophrenia was a personality disorder. Before the widespread acceptance of Sigmund Freud's work, Meyer began to contend that childhood sexual feelings could lead to serious mental problems.

Case Histories

Meyer's psychobiological studies showed that thoughts and feelings affected a person's physiological state. He became the first American psychiatrist to compile voluminous case histories of his patients, creating a behavior chart for the day-by-day notation of each patient's conduct. Containing data on hereditary and environmental details, social and economic circumstances, and conscious and unconscious factors, Meyer's case histories became the main research material of the Phipps Clinic.

Influence

During the first half of the twentieth century Meyer exercised a major influence on psychiatric research. Much of his teaching has been incorporated into psychological theory and practice in the United States, Britain, and other English-speaking nations. He can be credited with giving American psychiatry a pragmatic bent by maintaining a view of psychiatry as a biological science while incorporating many psychoanalytic principles. Through his illustrious career Meyer impressed generations of students with the idea that in the diagnosis and treatment of mental illness the whole person must be taken into account.

Sources:

James Bordley III and A. McGehee Harvey, Two Centuries of American Medicine, 1776-1976 (Philadelphia: W. B. Saunders, 1976);

Alfred Lief, ed., The Commonsense Psychiatry of Dr. Adolf Meyer (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1948).