As a founder of psychological realist writer, Henry Jamesrepresents a new literary technique in theWestern literary histo-ry. He goes even further than otherrealistwriters by showing hisunique notion that“outsideworld”affects the consciousnesses ofthemain characters in a novel to promote the developmentof theplot. In his opinion, only through the authors’direct impressionon the life can the reality be reached in the nove,l which isjudged from his definition on novel in The Art of Fiction. Thispaper, therefore, argues thatWundt’s psychological theory, in-stead ofFreud’s PsychologicalAnalysis, is the true psychologi-cal source ofPsychologicalRealism inHenry James.Ⅱ. PsychologicalDevelopm ent in H istory and
    Since the function ofnovels is to“represent life”in accord-ancewith the realist theory (James, 2003), in which“reality”is putpriority, now the crucial problem to judge is notwhethe“reality”should be represented ornot, instead, is how it can beThe development of psychology directly lays thefoundation for the formation ofPsychologicalRealism in the liter-ary history, which comes into being from people’s attention totheir“inner world”—consciousness. W ilhelm Max Wundt, aGerman psychologist and also the founder ofModern ScientificPsychology, once introduced the method of introspection into
PsychologicalAnalysis and influenced much on Henry James’definition on novel in which“a persona,l a direct impression oflife”is putpriority.
    Traditionally, psychologywas regarded as“a science of in-ner experience”, which was thought quite inadequate byWundtbecause“itmay give rise to the misunderstanding that psychol-gy has to dowith objects totally different from those of the so-called‘outer experience’”(Engelmann, 1897). Actually,psychology has to“investigate thewhole contentof experience inits relations”and“in its attributes derived directly from the sub-ject”. In accordance withWundt, in people’sminds exists theabstracting from the experiencing subjects, or, in otherwords,outerworld determines the mind so that outer experience is al-ways connected with comprehension and knowledge of the sub-jects from outerworld. The object of psychology is to investigatethe immediate experience of individuals (Wundt, 1902), contai-ning the subjective factors and psychological status. Whilemedi-ate experience, without any subjective factors and totally inde-pendent on the outerworld, is the objectofnatural sciencemere-ly. It is important to remember that individual immediate experi-ence, from the outerworld reality, can only be detected by theindividual himsel,f which is from the introspection to his ownpsychological activity. Through this subjective process, the real-ity is conveyed to the mind, and it is not difficult to understandthat individual impression and subjective idea is greatly deter-mined by the“objective”outer world. This also becomes thetheoretical basis for the psychological drawing in novels.Undoubtedly,“reality”has to be cognized before it is re-presented. Itsmanifestation, accordingly, willbe left the trace ofsubjectivity since it is the outcome of people’s minds. Thistrace, however, is impossible to be eliminated ifwe adopt a sci-ntific attitude towards the process of people’s cognition, andanymedia or pathway to present the object of cognition is con-nected with the“reflection”, which is the individual direct im-pression upon the world he faces. All these facts constitute the
basis forPsychologicalRealism to gain its initial impetus in the
latework ofHenry James.From the late 19th century, writers began to realize thatthere existed the common between psychology and novels compo-sition, in which themotivation forpeople’s behavior and theplorationfor spiritualworld are highly involved (Gao, 1996).Under the promotion of this thought, PsychologicalRealism, pri-marily as a writing technique, gradually formed in the late 19thentury.