While there is no longer any need to justify the psychoanalytic study of literary works, so handsomely has this interdisciplinary activity rewarded us, one does feel, in an age of increasingly difficult social and economic conditions, not to mention imminent armed conflicts upon half-a-dozen continents, a certain persistent impulse to say why the reader is offered a study of Henry James', The Princess Casamassima. Is it because psychoanalysis has virtually ignored what many authorities regard as one of James' finest novels?1 Partly. For comments such as these certainly impel one to sit up and take notice of this book:

My principal motive for presenting this paper is that The Princess Casamassima, offers us a rigorous, acute, analytically