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.
In this short monograph Meerloo deals with a variety of topics including historical concepts of disease from Hippocrates to Boerhaave, the Seventeenth Century Dutch physician from Leiden (where Meerloo received his medical training). He writes about epistemological concepts applied to medical thought, ambivalence, regression, professional preoccupations and prejudices, analysis of curative motivations and directions, and the meaning of therapeutic contact between psychiatrist and patient. It is often unclear how the concepts that Dr. Meerloo discusses pertaining to somatic medicine apply to psychiatry.
Meerloo underscores again and again the eclecticism of his approach and indicates his opposition to being considered a member of any school. Nevertheless the concepts behind his psychiatric thinking are almost all freudian, but attenuated. One might describe him as an eclectic by dilution. For example, although he states that transference is more than fifty per cent of the secret of cure, he devotes approximately two pages to this important topic, making a few such unrewarding statements as that the patient unwittingly wants his physician to be God, magician, and miracle worker.
Regression likewise becomes the theme for an unenlightening discussion in which we are informed that it sometimes has a kind of intrinsic curative function epitomized by the saying, 'Reculer pour mieux sauter—walking back in order to jump better' (p. 101). We are informed that 'The mysterious processes of regeneration on which all cure depends continually utilize these backsliding habits of cells and tissues in the service of repair. Regression often takes place in the service of reconditioning and man's renewed planning in futurization' (p. 100). We see here an example of the unwarranted jump that Meerloo makes from physical medicine to the mental. What he says about regeneration of cells and tissues he displaces to mental structures and functions without realizing that the connection