ABSTRACT
During Henry James' development as a novelist, his attention increasingly focused on the minds of his characters, and with the nature of their thinking and the "knowledge" upon which it was based. This chapter refers to a work of art that is contemporary with the birth of psychoanalysis and created without access to psychoanalytic thought, in order to support Freud's contention that the oedipal situation is the problem that must be faced on the road to knowledge. It suggests that present-day psychoanalytic theory allows us to add significantly to the understanding of humanity Freud gained from his particular guess at the Sphinx's riddle. Since he wrote, with the help of his discoveries, other thinkers have been concentrating on what we take with us, inside ourselves, when we go to meet the Sphinx. Both Freud and Klein recognized that human children confronted with the riddle of life have a powerful wish to know the facts and find an answer.
