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Henry James begins A Small Boy and Others by explaining why he found it difficult to respond to a request. Having been asked, shortly after William’s death, to write a memoir of his brother, he is forced to explain that he cannot do so in a direct and simple way, for he is not the master of his own thoughts. The very attempt to recall his experiences with his older brother has immersed him in a flood of associations. Since “it was to memory in the first place that my main appeal for particulars had to be made,” the request leads him “to live over the spent experience itself” and thereby to see the associations from the past “beg [i] n to multiply and… swarm” in his mind. Fascinated by these memories, he finds that he cannot dissociate those of William from the thousands of others that are enveloping him,“so inseparably and beautifully they seemed to hang together and the comprehensive case to decline mutilation”(3). Instead, then, of writing a memoir of his brother, he delivers himself to these associations, luxuriating in his memories of the sights that had fascinated him in his childhood and now do so again.

This essay seeks to examine certain qualities of Jamesian thought and the effects that they have on the author’s attempt to represent his younger self in A Small Boy and Others and Notes of a Son and Brother; their fundamental result is to render the author foreign to himself. The fiction to which James had devoted much of his life is marked by a state in which, in the words of Sigmund Freud,“the thought-process itself [has] becom [e] sexualized”; the very act of thinking can, in certain circumstances, become a source of jouissance (“Notes” 124). In the …