Adolf Meyer was a major force in molding psychiatry into its current form; his teachings are so solidly incorporated into American psychiatric theory and practice that the extent of his influence is often overlooked. He brought American psychiatry its pluralistic and instrumental orientation, its holistic approach, its psychobiological understanding that human behavior is integrated at a symbolic level, its conceptualization of psychiatric disorders as maladaptive reaction patterns rather than as discrete disease entities. its interest in the psychotherapy of the psychoses. He provided psychiatry with a fundamental scientific orientation that fitted into the remainder of science and also opened the way for the inclusion of data concerning human experience and biography in biological thinking.