Laufer, Laurie <br/><br/>
The Turn of the Screw, Scandal and Sex as a Riddle 

 -  2006.<br/>							 
<br/><br/> 50 
<br/><br/> Just like the second of Freud’s  Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, “Infantile Sexuality,” The Turn of the Screw by Henry James, a contemporary work branded by Freudianism, caused a scandal among the public opinion as well as among the “experts” in psychology and psychiatry. It was considered a subversive and perverse offence against children’s proverbial innocence. That is why James’s novella is paradigmatic of a certain interpretive position concerning infantile sexuality, which wavers between a normalcy which erodes sexual phantasy and the denunciation of madness in the Other. But if the approach we have chosen follows Freudian theory about the apprehension of discrepancy and ambiguity, James’s novella may suggest a new, different understanding: that of the phantasy-phantom which may welcome the transgressiveness and indeterminacy of child sexuality, and its phantasmatical indiscernibility; in short, its trans-sexuality.