Reading into Henry James

(17.) He advocated displaying in therapy a "calm quiet attentiveness" and appearing "impenetrable to the patient, and, like a mirror, reflect[ing] nothing but what is shown to him." The two quotes are from "Recommendations for Physicians on the Psychoanalytic Method of Treatment (1912)," in Freud, Therapy and Technique, 118, 124.

(18.) Benjamin, "One Way Street," in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 1, 1913-1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael Jennings (Cambridge: Harvard University Press), 466.

(19.) Henry James, The Art of the Novel (New York: Scribner, 1934), 169.

(20.) James probably had in mind a book such as (if not precisely) Thomson Jay Hudson's The Law of Psychic Phenomena (New York: Samuel Weiser, 1968), first published in 1892, which contains chapters, for example, on "Hypnotism and Crime," "A New System of Mental Therapeutics," "The Phenomena of Spiritism," and most relevant here, "Phantasms of the Dead."

(21.) James, The Art of the Novel, 172.

(22.) Ibid., 176.

(23.) Freud, "The Dynamics of the Transference" (1912), in Therapy and Technique, 114.

(24.) Henry James, The Turn of the Screw (New York: Norton, 1966), 2 [hereinafter cited parenthetically].

(25.) For an important class-based reading of The Turn of the Screw that has influenced my own, see Bruce Robbins's The Servant's Hand (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993).

(26.) Niklas Luhmann, The Differentiation of Society, trans. Stephen Holmes and Charles Larmore (New York: Columbia University Press. 1982).

(27.) Ibid., 249.

(28.) Ibid. The increased autonomy can produce a false sense of confidence in the efficaciousness of one's own operations. In fact. modernism could be seen as the recurring moment of misrecognition whereby each system operates as if it can and should solve the world's problems. Modernist legal theory, economics, international relations (think of the League of Nations), linguistics (the invention of Esperanto), and of course literature and art are all colored with a strong redemptive strain.

(29.) Jochen Schulte-Sasse, "Afterword: Can the Imagination Be Mimetic under Conditions of Modernity?" in Luiz Costa Lima, Control of the Imaginary: Reason and Imagination in Modern Times (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 215.

(30.) Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx (New York: Routledge, 1994), 7.

(31.) James to Francis Boott, October 11, 1895, Selected Letters, 293.

(32.) Robbins points out in The Servant's Hand that sex between servants and children was widely practiced and known but rarely spoken about in late-Victorian England. He recounts the following interesting anecdotal evidence. An officer in the Indian Medical Service wrote to Havelock Ellis as follows: "once at a club in Burma we were some twenty-six at a table and the subject of first intercourse came up. All had been led astray by servants save two, whom their sisters' governesses had initiated" (197).