SOURCE: “Freud's Dora and James's Turn of the Screw: Two Treatments of the Female ‘Case,’” in Criticism, Vol. 28, No. 1, Winter, 1986, pp. 73–87.

In the following essay, Cohen finds parallels between James's novella and Sigmund Freud's Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria.

Sigmund Freud's Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria and Henry James's The Turn of the Screw are two texts, written within three years of each other, which raise important questions about the nature and function of their respective genres. Freud writes a clinical case history; James, a ghost story. Yet a comparative reading of the two works not only calls into question their authors' use of these genres but also the basic assumptions about truth and fiction which we normally attach to the genres themselves.¹

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A Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria, perhaps the best known of Freud's...