William James and Gertrude Stein: Psychology Affecting Literature*

I will mention Gertrude Stein's influence on me, then William James's personal and theoretical impact on Gertrude Stein, then, his student, Leon Solomons's influence on Stein. Finally, I will speculate on Gertrude Stein's psychodynamics, using an outline for an imagined novel in which I treat Stein in analytically oriented therapy.

I met up with Gertrude Stein's work in 1976 soon after I began at Chestnut Lodge. Prentiss Taylor, then the Lodge's art therapist, when he learned I had gone to The Johns Hopkins Medical School, said that I must read Three Lives, which describes three women from Stein's medical school days there. He told me about the Rockville library's collection of spoken-word records. I could transpose the records to cassettes and hear her read to me as I drove the 45-minute commute to work. So, I heard her saying again and again in The Making of Americans

Repeating then is in every one, in every one their being and their feeling and their way of realizing everything and every one comes out of them in repeating. More and more then every one comes to be clear to some one. Slowly every one in continuous repeating, to their minutest variation, comes to be clearer to some one. Every one who ever was or is or will be living sometimes will be clearly realised by someone. Sometime there will be an ordered history of every one. Slowly every kind of one comes into ordered recognition. (Stein, 1934, p. 206)