Henry James\u27s "The Friends of the Friends" first appeared in 1896 under the title of "The Way It Came", two years before the publication of The Turn of the Screw, perhaps the most provocative ghost story written by James. Since Edmund Wilson argued that the ghost in The Turn of the Screw was simply a production of the narrator\u27s mind, many critics have also focused on the mind of the narrator in "The Friends of the Friends." They conclude that the narrator is jealous of her friend who shares the psychical experience with her fiance, which makes the narrator imagine the ghost of her friend. To read this story simply as a product of the narrator\u27s jealousy, leaves some inconsistency remaining. The ambiguity of the ghost and the narrator\u27s enigmatic behavior lead the reader to another interpretation. This paper demonstrates the alternative reading that the narrator, obsessed with her hypothesis, creates her "fantasy" in the sense used in psychoanalysis, meaning \u27the imaginings to which we are all addicted, but which some disturbed persons take in greater or lesser degree as "fact."\u27 At the end of the story we realize that we have been caught in the narrator\u27s imaginative world and that "The Friends of the Friends" is James\u27s "amusette" to catch those readers who are "not easily caught.
