Adolf Meyer

Adolf Meyer (born September 13, 1866 – died March 17, 1950) was a Swiss-born American psychiatrist who rose to prominence as the president of the American Psychiatric Association and was one of the most influential figures in American psychiatry in the first half of the twentieth century. He emphasized the need of collecting detailed case histories on patients, pioneering the holistic approach in psychotherapy. He was also one of the early pioneers of the Mental Hygiene Movement.

Life

Adolf Meyer was born in Niederwenigen, near Zurich, Switzerland, a son of a Zwinglian minister. Meyer was trained in neurobiology and neurophysiology at the University of Zürich. He received his M.D. in 1892, after studying psychiatry with Auguste-Henri Forel at the Burghölzli Mental Hospital. He also studied in England with Hughlings Jackson and in Paris with Jean-Martin Charcot. Meyer subsequently began his professional career as a neuropathologist.

Mayer was hoping to get the teaching position at the University of Zurich, but after being unable to secure it, he emigrated to the United States in 1892. He at first practiced neurology and taught at the University of Chicago, where he was exposed to the ideas of the Chicago functionalists. From 1893 to 1895 he served as pathologist at the newly founded Illinois Eastern Hospital for the Insane at Kankakee, Illinois. After that he worked at the state hospital at Worcester, Massachusetts (1895–1902), all the while publishing papers in neurology, neuropathology, and psychiatry. He became associated with the psychologist William James and the philosopher-educator John Dewey,

In 1902 Meyer became director of the Pathological Institute of the New York State Hospital system (shortly afterwards given its present name, The Psychiatric Institute), where in the next few years he shaped much of American psychiatry by emphasizing the importance of keeping detailed patient records and by introducing both Emil Kraepelin's classificatory system and Sigmund Freud's ideas. While in the New York State Hospital system Meyer adopted Freud's ideas about the importance both of sexuality and of the formative influence of early rearing on the adult personality.

Meyer became Professor of Psychiatry at Cornell University in 1904, where he stayed until 1909. From 1909 to 1941 he was professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine where he also served as Director of the Henry Phipps Psychiatric Clinic from its inception in 1913. Under his leadership the clinic became an internationally renowned training center for psychiatrists.

Meyer died on March 17, 1950, in Baltimore, Maryland, U.S.

Work

Although Meyer's work was greatly influenced by Charles Peirce, William James, and John Dewey, he never adhered to any particular one school of psychiatry. He had an eclectic approach, combining together the contributions of biology, physiology, psychology, and neurology into one practical approach to mental health science. He called his approach ergasiology, or psychobiology, which had the goal to integrate the psychological and biological studies of human beings.

To stress the dynamic nature of mental disorders, he invented a new system of classification - ergasiology - based on the Greek root erg (from ergon, work). The typical terms in this system were ergasiatry (psychiatry), oligergasia (idiocy), and merergasia (hysteria).

To make accurate diagnosis of the problems his patients experienced, Meyer tried to take into account all biological, psychological, and social factors relevant to a case. He thus emphasized collecting detailed case histories for patients, paying particular attention to the social and environmental background to a patient's upbringing. He looked into patient's physical condition, past history, family life, work situation, and other facts that were relevant to treatment. Meyer believed that mental illness results from personality dysfunction, rather than brain pathology. His later teachings resisted some of the ideas of Sigmund Freud, which Meyer thought placed too much emphasis on factors that were tangential to the functional needs of patients in their everyday lives.

Meyer’s wife (née Mary Potter Brooks) participated in the work of her husband. She was the one who collected data about her husband’s patients. She visited them in their homes to observe their everyday life, talked to their families and worked up detailed case records. In this manner Meyers pioneered the path for psychiatric social work, an essential part of a psychiatric treatment today.

Meyer was a strong believer in the importance of empiricism, and advocated repeatedly for a scientific approach to understanding mental illness. He introduced the possibility of infections (then viewed as the cutting edge concept of scientific medicine) being a biological cause of behavioral abnormalities, in contrast to eugenic theories that emphasized heredity and to Freud's theories of childhood traumas.

It was Meyer who suggested the term 'mental hygiene' to Clifford Beers, who himself had recovered from manic-depressive insanity. Beers later founded, with the support of Meyer and William James, the Connecticut Society for Mental Hygiene (1908) and the National Committee for Mental Hygiene (1909). The mental hygiene movement sought to improve the quality of care for the mentally ill, to prevent mental illness if at all possible, and to educate the public on mental health.

Legacy

Meyer wrote no books; his pervasive influence on American psychiatry stemmed instead from his numerous published papers, his prestige, and his students, both at Manhattan State and, especially, at Johns Hopkins. Many of his students went on to make significant contributions to American psychiatry or psychoanalysis, though not necessarily as Meyerians. Always eclectic and willing to absorb ideas from whatever sources he found relevant, Meyer never formed his own discrete school of thought with disciples. Most of the founders of the New York Psychoanalytic Society had worked under Meyer at Manhattan State Hospital, including its chief architect Abraham Arden Brill.

Though Meyer's own system of nomenclature never caught on, his ideas, especially those emphasizing the importance of social factors, and his insistence on understanding the life of the patient through careful interviewing, did exert some influence but perhaps remain largely unappreciated in the history of American psychiatry.

Publications

• Meyer, Adolf. 1948. The Commonsense Psychiatry of Dr. Adolf Meyer: Fifty-two Selected Papers. (Alfred A. Lief, ed.). Ayer Co. Publishers. ISBN 0405052162
• Meyer, Adolf. 1950-1952. The Collected Papers of Adolf Meyer. (Eunice E. Winters, ed.; 4 vols.). Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press
• Meyer, Adolf. 1957. Psychobiology: a Science of Man. (Winters, Eunice E. & Bowers, Anna M. eds.). Springfield, IL: Charles C Thomas

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Burnham, John C. 1967. Psychoanalysis and American Medicine, 1894-1917: Medicine, Science, and Culture. New York: International Universities Press
• Burnham, John C. 1977. Adolf Meyer. In Benjamin B. Wolman (Ed.), International Encyclopedia of Psychiatry, Psychology, Psychoanalysis, & Neurology, (pp. 215-216). New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold Company for Aesculapius Publishers.
• Gach, John 1980. Culture & Complex: On the Early History of Psychoanalysis in America. In Edwin R. Wallace & Lucius Pressley (Eds.), Essays in the History of Psychiatry, (pp. 135-160). Columbia, SC: William S. Hall Psychiatric Institute
• Leys, Ruth, & Evans, Rand B. 1990. Defining American Psychology: The Correspondence between Adolf Meyer and Edward Bradford Titchener. Baltimore/London: The Johns Hopkins University Press. ISBN 0801838657
• Lidz, Theodore. 1966. Adolf Meyer and the Development of American Psychiatry. The American Journal of Psychiatry, 123(3), 320-332.

External links

• Adolf Meyer And The Myth/Reality Of Mental Illness: Implications For Current Understanding – On Meyer’s work
• Adolf Meyer – Biography in Encyclopedia Britannica
• Adolf Meyer – Short biography
• Adolf Meyer Collection - Guide to the papers collection of Adolf Meyer at The Alan Mason Chesney Medical Archives of the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions
• What Would Adolf Meyer Have Thought Of The Neo-Kraepelinian Approach? – An article on Meyer’s work

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