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  • The Making of Men and Women:Gertrude Stein, Hugo Münsterberg, and the Discourse of Work
  • Linda Martin (bio)

In June of 1895, while traveling by ship to Hamburg, psychologist Hugo Münsterberg wrote an affectionate letter to his student Gertrude Stein, whom he had taught and mentored during her freshman and sophomore years at Radcliffe College. Wishing to bid her a formal goodbye—Münsterberg would not return to Harvard for his permanent position as professor and head of the psychological laboratory until 1897, when Stein was at medical school in Baltimore—he expressed his gratitude to her for their collaborations during his time in Cambridge:

[W]hile I met [at Radcliffe] all types and kinds of students, you were to me the ideal student, just as a female student ought to be, and if in later years you look into printed discussions which I have in mind to publish about students in America, I hope you will then pardon me if you recognize some features of my ideal student picture as your own. I hope to hear about your skill often and expect the best from you.1

This cordial letter highlights a number of compelling points of connection between student and teacher. Münsterberg's invocation of "types and kinds" of students betrays a psychologist's impulse to analyze and categorize human character. It is an impulse Stein shared, as would become clear in The Making of Americans, in which she repeatedly iterates that "[t]here are millions always being made of every kind of men and women" and that "[t]his is now a history of every kind of them."2 The letter also refers to their shared commitment to the field of physiological psychology, [End Page 43] via Münsterberg's allusion to Stein's work in the Harvard laboratory. Finally, running through Münsterberg's missive is a subtexual concern with gender: his vocal devotion to Radcliffe, a women's college formerly known as the Harvard Annex, speaks to his advocacy for women's access to higher education, even as his casual use of the qualifier "female student" carries connotations of sexual difference. Both of these subjects, as I will demonstrate later on, were of concern to the young Stein.

Compared to the considerable breadth of scholarship pursuing the connections between Stein and contemporary psychological luminaries like William James and Alfred North Whitehead, little attention has been paid to Stein's association with Münsterberg, a man whose name is known today by few apart from historians of psychology.3 This neglect exists despite Stein and Münsterberg's congenial personal relationship, biographical similarities—both were of German heritage and born into a Jewish faith from which they would later distance themselves—and the fact that Stein specifically named Münsterberg as one of her early influences: in a letter to Robert Haas, she cites him as one of the people she worked with "in particular" at Radcliffe College.4 When critics do mention Münsterberg in their discussions of Stein's psychological work, it is typically to briefly mention his role as advisor for her early experiments in automatic writing. Yet during the period in which Stein was at work on some of her most critically acclaimed texts, including The Making of Americans (1925), Three Lives (1909), and Tender Buttons (1914), Münsterberg rivaled James in terms of both academic reputation and public notoriety. Matthew Hale, Jr. asserts that in the early 1910s Münsterberg was "arguably the best-known psychologist in America."5 Credited as the founder of industrial psychology, Münsterberg popularized his theories by writing articles for widely read periodicals, and his 1913 book, Psychology and Industrial Efficiency, was a best-seller. When Münsterberg died unexpectedly of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1916, however, his reputation had already begun to suffer a precipitous decline due to his vocal support of Germany during World War I.6 Münsterberg's present-day obscurity has allowed scholars to overlook the role his psychological theories played in shaping modernist conceptions of mental life.

In the introduction to his 2004 collection The Mind of Modernism, Mark Micale criticized modernist studies as a whole for...

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