I have been interested in
Adolf Meyer since my training as a psychiatrist forty years ago. While
one might say that Meyer, who was the most influential American
psychiatrist in the first half of the twentieth century, is the
forgotten psychiatrist of the twenty-first, his teachings were still in
the air in the 1970s. But they were just in the air. Freudian theories
and treatments were what we were taught. Trying to find out just what
Meyer thought and did was difficult, not just because his writings were
not a part of our curriculum, but because his writings were
impenetrable.
Many thanks are now due the historian Susan Lamb for
writing a lively and lucid account of Meyer's most creative period-- the
twenty years before the World War I. She provides a chapter on his life
and influences and another on his concept of psychobiology. She also
uses a day in the life of a typical patient at the Phipps Clinic that Meyer ran to
show how every detail of a patient's life was used in a therapeutic
effort. She then provides two lengthy case histories the show the
implications of Meyer's ideas. These are beautifully presented and
really gave me a sense of how psychiatrists thought about patients in
the early years of the twentieth century. She ends with a chapter that
tries to relate Meyer's ideas to issues that psychiatrists and others
struggle with today.
Now I finally feel that I understand Meyer and the many ways that breathing that Meyerian air in my youth influenced my life.
Perhaps I wasn't clear. The title of Susan Lamb's book is Pathologist of the Mind: Adolf Meyer and the Origins of American Psychiatry, (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014)
Wednesday, February 25, 2015
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