ABSTRACT
In The Turn of the Screw Henry James's unconscious speaks directly and in the most distinct tones imaginable. It is not for nothing that The Turn of the Screw has attracted more psychoanalytic attention than anything else that Henry James wrote. Even without the benefit of a psychoanalytic training, the average reader is likely to have a powerful intuition of extraordinary and murky psychological depths in the piece. One of the things that The Turn of the Screw—uniquely—enables to do is to reconstruct phrases of instinctual conflict in the early development of Henry James. For if displacements, condensations, and over-determinations abound in The Turn of the Screw, they are already clearly visible in the surface elements of the story and are not limited to the secret interplay of these elements with their hidden unconscious antecedents. This is the most visible corpse, the most clearly advertised and examinable dead body in James's work.
