He oversaw the building and development of the Henry Phipps Psychiatric Clinic at Johns Hopkins Hospital, opened in April 1913, making sure it was suitable for scientific research, training and treatment.

During his time at the university, he studied abroad in Paris, London and Edinburgh, working under John Hughlings Jackson and Jean-Martin Charcot.

[7] In 1902, he became director of the Pathological Institute of the New York State Hospital system (shortly afterwards given its present name, The Psychiatric Institute), where in the next few years he shaped much of American psychiatry by emphasizing the importance of keeping detailed patient records and by introducing both Emil Kraepelin's classificatory system and Sigmund Freud's ideas.

Meyer found many of Freud's ideas and therapeutic methods insightful and useful, but he rejected psychoanalysis as a wholesale etiological explanation of mental disorders in favor of his own theory of psychobiology.

He never practiced psychoanalysis and always kept it at arm's length from Johns Hopkins because of Freud's increasingly dogmatic insistence on the psychical causation of mental illnesses.

[2] Meyer also conducted a nine-month study of the brain of Giuseppe Zangara, assassin who shot at President Franklin Roosevelt and killed Mayor Anton Cermak.

Most of the founders of the New York Psychoanalytic Society had worked under Meyer at Manhattan State Hospital, including its chief architect Abraham Arden Brill, and Charles Macfie Campbell.

[citation needed] Meyer and William Henry Welch played an instrumental role in Clifford Beers' founding of the Connecticut Society for Mental Hygiene in 1908.

[21] Under Meyer's direction, Leo Kanner founded the first child psychiatry clinic in the United States at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in 1930.

[22] Meyer's main contribution was in his ideas of psychobiology, where he focused on addressing all biological, social and psychological factors and symptoms pertaining to a patient.

He also stressed the idea that social and biological factors that affect someone throughout their entire life should be heavily considered when diagnosing and treating a patient.

[24] Meyer was a strong believer in the importance of empiricism, and advocated repeatedly for a scientific, and, particularly, a biological approach to understanding mental illness.

In 1906, he reframed dementia praecox as a "reaction type", a discordant bundle of maladaptive habits that arose as a response to biopsychosocial stressors.

[25] Meyer was also involved with the Eugenics Records Office, which he viewed as a natural extension of the mental hygiene movement which he helped to create.

[27] Meyer had oversight over Henry Cotton, who ran a psychiatric hospital which regularly extracted the teeth and organs from patients, resulting in about a 45% death rate.

Cotton believed that nearly all psychiatric problems could be resolved through the complete removal of teeth and subjected hundreds of patients to this treatment, over their objections and resistance.

Richard Noll, American Madness: The Rise and Fall of Dementia Praecox (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011).

S. D. Lamb, Pathologist of the Mind: Adolf Meyer and the Origins of American Psychiatry (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014) Reissued in paperback in 2018.

Susan Lamb, "'My Resisting Getting Well': Neurasthenia and Subconscious Conflict in Patient-Psychiatrist Interactions in Prewar America," Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 52/2 (2016): pages 124–45.

Susan Lamb, "Social, Motivational, and Symptomatic Diversity: An Analysis of the Patient Population of the Phipps Psychiatric Clinic at Johns Hopkins Hospital, 1913 – 1917," Canadian Bulletin of Medical History Vol.

Meyer's importance to the introduction and development of American psychoanalysis is discussed and interpreted in: John C. Burnham, Psychoanalysis and American Medicine, 1894–1917: Medicine, Science, and Culture (New York: International Universities Press, 1967); John Gach, "Culture & Complex: On the Early History of Psychoanalysis in America" (pages 135–160) in Essays in the History of Psychiatry, edited by Edwin R. Wallace IV and Lucius Pressley (Columbia, SC: William S. Hall Psychiatric Institute, 1980); Nathan Hale, Freud and the Americans: The Beginnings of Psychoanalysis in the United States (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995); and Chapter Six of S. D. Lamb, Pathologist of the Mind: Adolf Meyer and the Origins of American Psychiatry (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014); Ruth Leys, "Meyer's Dealings With Jones: A Chapter in the History of the American Response to Psychoanalysis," Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 17 (1981): pages 445–465; Ruth Leys, "Meyer, Jung, and the Limits of Association," Bulletin of the History of Medicine 59 (1985): pages 345–360; Scull, Andrew, and Jay Schulkin, "Psychobiology, Psychiatry, and Psychoanalysis: The Intersecting Careers of Adolf Meyer, Phyllis Greenacre, and Curt Richter."