You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
This is a belated and carefully edited publication of the first Salmon Lectures given by Adolf Meyer in 1932. In these lectures, Dr. Meyer set out to summarize the entire scope and range of his views and his teaching in the field of psychiatry. This volume admirably succeeds in accomplishing the task originally set. The lectures were later amplified and revised by Dr. Meyer and put into final form by the editors of the present volume, who were well acquainted with his thinking.
The book is divided into three sections: Psychobiology, Pathology, and Therapy. In all sections, the editors have preserved and carefully reproduced Dr. Meyer's constant digression from the details of a point in discussion to the basically biological, humanistic, and melioristic philosophy which was the bedrock foundaton of his approach to people, sick and well.
Appropriately enough, over half of the text is given over to the section on Psychobiology. Meyer's deep and continued interest in the fields of pathology and neurology, with his interest in the operationalism of Charles S. Peirce and John Dewey, combined to form a consistent, austere but genetic-dynamic interest in the observable and describable facts of the mentally ill. His bold statement, in 1906, that schizophrenic disorders were to be understood in terms of factors in the patient's life experience was one expression of Meyer's insistence on the independent life and validity of the field