454
PARTISAN REVIEW
At the age of eighteen, in the earliest days of the Civil War, Hen–
ry sustained a persistent physical injury. A keen sense of created im–
potence, combined with a possible suspicion of unconscious malinger–
ing, now crystallized his early sense of inferiority into "castration
anxiety." The "obscure but intimate hurt" was experienced as involv–
ing not only the manliness of war, then socially so moot, but also the
v1rility of love, which was focal in the adolescent stage of his indivi–
dual development. Identification with the crippled ("castrated") but
powerful father could have figured in the trauma both through the
son's remarkably similar accident and in their common incapacita–
tion. At the same time, the injury, interpreted more deeply, may have
been unconsciously embraced as a token of filial submission: the
acknowledged weakness was at onee peculiarly appropriated as "an
inexhaustible interest." Introversion in which both aggression and sex–
uality were repressed was now established as a
modus vivendi.
The possible role of constitutional bisexuality should be noted in
passing, even if only speculatively. Injuries like the one experienced
by James may be conceived to subdue the more active and masculine
components of personality and accentuate as ·a counterpoise the more
passive and feminine ones. The creative drive of genius seems often
to be enhanced even as its capacity is paradoxically also limited by
such a destiny.
It was at any rate after his injury that James turned to the art of
fiction. His writing served him both as an escape from frustration by
way of fantasy and as a partial means of solving his problems through
sublimation. But the fantasied escape proved insufficient, and he there–
fore soon abandoned the American scene that had become to
him
in–
tolerable. During most of his life he lived in England. His various
novels and tales written both before and after the departure from
America acquired their notorious peculiarities-precious overqualifica–
tion of style and restraint of sexual passion-from the repressed pattern
of his life. The acute psychological insights in which his work
abounds sprang in part, however, from the introspective vigilance al–
lied with these "defects."
As
James began to enter the final third of his life, a resurgence
of
his buried drives occurred. The supernatural stories which began
to come from his pen during this period testify to this "return of the
repressed." His ghosts consistently represent an apotheosis of the un–
lived life. This fictional attempt to face again the early unsolved
problems was followed compulsively by an actual revisit to America.
As
the criminal returns to the scene of his crime, James now went back
