Adolf Meyer and the Development of American Psychiatry

Abstract

Adolf Meyer was a major force in molding psychiatry into its current form; his teachings are so solidly incorporated into American psychiatric theory and practice that the extent of his influence is often over-looked. He brought American psychiatry its pluralistic and instrumental orientation, its holistic approach, its psychobiological understanding that human behavior is integrated at a symbolic level, its conceptualization of psychiatric disorders as maladaptive reaction patterns rather than as discrete disease entities, its interest in the psychotherapy of the psychoses. He provided psychiatry with a fundamental scientific orientation that fitted into the remainder of science and also opened the way for the inclusion of data concerning human experience and biography in biological thinking.