Meier, C. A. (Zürich). ‘Dynamische Psychologie und die Klassische Welt’ (Dynamic psychology and the classical world).  Analytische Psychologie  10,  276-89 (1979).

C. A. Meier, author of the well known Ancient Incubation and Modern Psychotherapy (first published 1949), has in the present article drawn attention to a different aspect of the healing art in the ancient world. His earlier publication deals with the cult practices associated with the god Asclepius which incorporated customs and beliefs dating back to pre-historic times. Here man is the passive recipient of divine intervention, which culminates in the healing efficacy of dreams sent by the god. In the present paper C. A. Meier confines himself to evidence of the fifth and fourth pre-Christian centuries as it appears in Greek literary sources of the time. By the classical period of Greek civilisation man has discovered his identity as a person; he has begun to think, to analyse and classify what he observes; in brief, he has achieved a major degree of self-consciousness, including awareness of what is going on within himself. His ideas of illness and of its remedies have become secularised accordingly. As a result many of the concepts formulated in this period—or at least their analogies—are still with us today.

C. A. Meier presents in his paper a list (extending over four printed pages) of symptoms of illness and their remedies, as envisaged by different authors, which show basic similarities.