Freud not only developed principles of psychoanalysis that have guided clinical psychotherapists since their formulation during the early years of twentieth century Vienna, he also applied these principles to non-medical analyses of dreams, jokes, parapraxes, memory phenomena and literary creations. His concepts of the unconscious, conscious, censorship, repression, ambiguity and projective defenses have taught critics and readers how to read. This paper uses Freud’s reading techniques to analyze two very different works, Henry James’s novella,