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In an interview with Michael Neve in 1983 (Neve, 1992), Claire Winnicott discusses how her husband Donald went straight from university in Cambridge to working as the medical officer in charge on a destroyer in the Navy during the First World War. At one point she suggests that Winnicott, a first-year medical student at the time, may have known very little about the job and she confides almost as an aside: “[h]e had a lot of free time and read the novels of Henry James, as far as I can tell, most of the time. He had a lot of time for reading” (p. 179). It is not altogether surprising that the middle-class, well-educated Winnicott would have a lot of time for reading, but as psychoanalysts we might want to pause for a moment to imagine why he appears to have been drawn to a writer such as Henry James. Was it simply James's supreme concern with the passage from innocence into adulthood and the painful and costly problems encountered on the path to emotional maturity? Certainly, as a psychoanalyst in the making, Winnicott was to develop this same theme in his theoretical writing throughout his life, charting in great and imaginative detail the infant's journey from absolute dependence on maternal care to relative independence based on a hard-won capacity to be alone.
Be that as it may, the imaginative fiction of Henry James has often been considered a particular source of interest for psychoanalysts, with Rivkin (2007) pointing out that James, whilst a “genius of consciousness is also—and necessarily—the genius of the unconscious” (p. 59). James's writing can be seen to index a preoccupation akin to Freud's with a kind of “doubling”