Adolf Meyer

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(b Mechernich, nr Euskirchen, 17 June 1881; d Baltrum, East Friesian islands, 24 July 1929). German architect and teacher. He trained as a cabinetmaker and studied at the Kunstgewerbeschule, D?sseldorf, where he was particularly influenced by J. L. M. Lauwerik's theory of proportion. From 1907 to 1908 he worked in Peter Behrens's office, and from 1909 to 1910 he worked in Bruno Paul's office in Berlin. From 1910 until 1925 he worked in close collaboration with Walter Gropius and directed his offices in Berlin and Weimar. In addition he was an outstanding teacher of architecture at the Bauhaus in Weimar (1919-25). When the school moved to Dessau, Ernst May appointed him director of the planning consultancy at the structural engineering office in Frankfurt am Main. He also taught structural engineering at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Frankfurt. In 1919 he signed the manifesto of the Arbeitsrat f?r Kunst and was a member of the architects' group Der Ring. In 1928 he founded the Frankfurt Oktobergruppe with, among others, Willi Baumeister, Mart Stam and Josef Gantner.

See the Abbreviations for further details.

German architect, he worked with Lauweriks (before 1907), Behrens (1907–8), Paul (1909–10), and Gropius (1911–14 and 1919–25). With the last he designed the Fagus Shoe Factory, Alfeld-an-der-Leine, Germany (1910–11), housing at Wittemberg, Frankfurt-an-der-Oder (1913–14), the Kleffel Cotton Factory, Dramburg (1913–14), and the Model Factory and Office Building for the Werkbund Exhibition, Cologne (1914), all of which are more controlled and elegant than anything Gropius was to produce later on his own. The Fagus curtain-walling and the Cologne curved glazed cases for the stairs were to be enor-mously influential on International Modernism. In 1925 he designed part of the Zeiss Factory, Jena. He taught at the Bauhaus (1919–25).

Bibliography

• Casabella, xlvi (1982), 40–7
• A. Meyer (1925)
• Neue Frankfurt, iii/9 (1929), 165–82

The full bibliography for this book is available to download as a pdf file.
Download the bibliography for A Dictionary of Architecture and Landscape Architecture (PDF: 1.2MB)

1866-1950

Adolf Meyer was born on September 3, 1866, in Niederweningen, a small village near Zurich, Switzerland, and died on March 17, 1950, in Baltimore, Maryland. An early, influential psychiatrist, Meyer was one of the founders of the New York Psychoanalytic Society and of the American Psychoanalytic Association.

Son of a Zwinglian minister, Meyer studied medicine in Zurich, where he was student of Auguste Forel at the Burghölzli Mental Hospital. He also studied in England with Hughlings Jackson and in Paris with Jean Martin Charcot.

In 1892 Meyer emigrated to the United States. He worked at the Illinois Eastern Hospital for the Insane, then at the Worcester Lunatic Hospital, in Massachusetts. From 1902 he practiced at the New York State Pathological Institute of Manhattan. There he joined early informal meetings about psychoanalysis. From 1904 to 1909 Meyer served as professor of psychiatry at Cornell Medical School. He began teaching his original views concerning dementia praecox (schizophrenia), taking a broader view of its etiology and prognosis than was common at the time. (The Emil Kraepelin tradition of psychiatry viewed dementia praecox as an organic disease without possibility of cure.) In 1909 Meyer lectured on the dynamics of this disease at Clark University's twentieth anniversary jubilee, in which Freud also took part. In 1910 he became the first psychiatrist appointed to a chair at Johns Hopkins University, where he taught until 1941. And in 1913 he was named director of the university's new Henry Phipps Psychiatric Clinic.

At a time when knowledge about the brain was highly limited, Meyer deemphasized organic factors in such severe mental disorders as schizophrenia, in favor of a functional typology. His Psychobiology: A Science of Man, published posthumously in 1957, represents in part the influence of Hughlings Jack-son's biological approach to neurology; Meyer had studied Jackson's institute in London in 1891. (In Meyer's usage, psychobiology adumbrates but is far short of the contemporary discipline of the same name.) Downplaying efforts to link behavior to brain lesions or neurological abnormalities, Meyer attempted to relate specific disease states to conscious emotions, linking even severe disorders to a patient's experience and habitual reactions. Meyer did not view schizophrenia, for example, as an untreatable illness with a fatal prognosis, as was common in Kraepelinian psychiatry. He suggested instead that dynamic factors could lead to debilitating mental disease, and he advocated treating individual patients in private practice. This viewpoint, because it saw psychotherapy as offering optimistic prognoses, helped introduce psychoanalytic thinking into psychiatry and extend its influence in the field from the mid-twentieth century.

Meyer was also a key figure in the mental-health movement in the United States. Psychiatrists and neurologists were formerly largely limited to practicing in mental institutions. Meyer advocated employing psychiatrists in schools, prisons, and a variety of community and workplace settings. He thus was instrumental in vastly expanding the role of psychiatrists.

Bibliography

Bonin, Werner F. (1963). Die grossen Psychologen. Düsseldorf, Germany: Econ Taschenbuch.

Hale, Nathan G. (1995). The rise and crisis of psychoanalysis in the United States. New York: Oxford University Press.

Leys, Ruth. (1990). Adolf Meyer: A biographical note. In Ruth Leys and Rand B. Evans (Eds.), Defining American psychology: The correspondence between Adolf Meyer and Edward Bradford Titchener. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Meyer, Adolf. (1950-1952). Collected papers of Adolf Meyer (4 vols.). Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press.

——. (1957). Psychobiology: A science of man. Springfield, IL: Thomas.

—ELKE MÜHLLEITNER

Adolf Meyer may refer to:

• Adolf Meyer (psychiatrist) (1866–1950)
• Adolf Bernard Meyer (1840–1911), anthropologist and ornithologist
• Adolf Meyer (architect) (1881–1929)

See also

• Adolf Mayer, German chemist

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