Psychobiology, Psychiatry, and Psychoanalysis: The Intersecting Careers of Adolf Meyer, Phyllis Greenacre, and Curt Richter

By common consent, Adolf Meyer (1866–1950) was the most prominent and influential American psychiatrist of the first half of the twentieth century. Particularly after his appointment to Johns Hopkins, as its first professor of psychiatry, he dominated psychiatry in the United States until his retirement in 1941. But his influence was almost equally strong in Britain, where his pragmatism and therapeutic eclecticism had a wide appeal. In this paper, we examine some central aspects of Meyer’s life and work, and focus particularly on his role as a mentor and patron of the research and careers of two other major figures in twentieth-century psychiatry and psychobiology, broadly conceived. The first of these, Phyllis Greenacre (1894–1989), worked closely with Meyer from 1916, when she graduated from Chicago Rush medical school and joined his staff at Hopkins, till her abrupt departure from Baltimore in late 1927. For the next decade, Meyer continued to play an important role in her life and career, though to his dismay she was now progressively abandoning his distinctive type of psychiatry for psychoanalysis. Completing that process of intellectual transition just as Freud’s followers were moving to a position of institutional and theoretical dominance in American psychiatry, Greenacre rose to remarkable prominence in those circles, one of the few non-refugee analysts to become part of the psychoanalytic elite. Curt Richter (1894–1988) was still another promising young scientist attracted to Meyer’s circle, initially through a decision to move from Harvard to Johns Hopkins to work with the founder of behaviourist psychology, John B Watson. With Watson’s resignation from the Hopkins faculty in the aftermath of a sex scandal, Meyer orchestrated Richter’s succession to head the psychological laboratory, now renamed the psychobiology laboratory. For seven decades, Richter would remain at Hopkins, a highly successful experimentalist whose early work did much to lend empirical substance to Meyer’s programmatic calls to develop “psychobiology”.