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Woodrow Wilson: A Psychological Study (American Presidents (Transaction Paperback))

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This book reads not so much like a psychoanalysis as like a settling of scores. Freud, as an Austrian, felt betrayed by Wilson's retreat from his Fourteen Points at Versailles; Bullitt, later Ambassador to Russia and instrumental in rescuing Freud from Vienna at the start of Nazi rule there, was a minor member of the American delegation to Versailles and resigned scandalously from it when Wilson ignored diplomatic overtures from Lenin. Their disappointment in Wilson spills over into unforgiving near-hatred, yet the book is well-argued and clearly-written enough to be well worth reading.

The book opens with a profile of Wilson's childhood, his hero-worshipping relationship with his father, and his much more uncertain relationship with the younger brother who was born when Wilson was 10. The authors repeatedly state that Wilson was "ugly": well, ugly is as ugly does, and it's not clear that this was a major issue for Wilson himself, although he was somewhat sensitive about his appearance. This is followed by a somewhat eccentric explanation of basic Freudian tenets. I'm not very familiar with Freudianism, but the strangely hydraulic talk about five outlets for the libido sounded very odd. However, it can be accepted as explaining the governing terms of the analysis to follow, rather than necessarily as a scientific description.

Wilson had a habit of making extremely close friends -- Hibben at Princeton, House and (to a lesser extent) Tumulty in politics -- and then irrevocably breaking with them following differences in policy. (Cary Grayson, Wilson's doctor for the last twelve years of his life, tells a heartbreaking story of a misunderstanding when Wilson returned to Princeton on a visit, that led to Hibben, face glowing, standing in front of Wilson saying "I believe you sent for me?", only to have Wilson, expressionless, say, "No, no, you are mistaken" and turn away). Freud and Bullitt expend a lot of words studying how these close friendships turned to complete breaks. They explain it as Wilson recreating with these younger men his own relationship with his father, the friends playing the role of the young Wilson, and then breaking because Wilson interpreted political disagreements as rejection of his fatherly wisdom. This is a coherent and useful analysis, though not necessarily the whole story. An interesting note is that Freud and Bullitt, in turning against Wilson whom Bullitt at least had formerly admired, are repeating the pattern they find so striking in Wilson.

The description of Wilson's gradual collapse at Versailles and his failure to ensure fair treatment for the defeated central powers is well told. It seems that recent research on the effect of Wilson's health on these negotiations could have deepened the analysis here if it had been available to the authors.

In the description of Wilson's doomed tour of the West in September 1919, trying to sell the Treaty to the public, some compassion finally breaks through. The authors point out just how little the Treaty Wilson described in his speeches had to do with the Treaty that was signed in Versailles; they regard this not as lying but as a psychosis brought on by the unbearable position he was in.

(...)Although unsympathetic overall, this retelling of the story is a useful part of the ongoing discussion about the meaning of Woodrow Wilson's Presidency. It should definitely be read by serious Wilson scholars.

Sigmund Freud and William C. Bullitt produced a psychological study called THOMAS WOODROW WILSON, but they couldn't call it a psychoanalytical examination because they could not get Wilson, who died in 1924, to submit to the kind of personal investigation that would confirm the factors of his inner life. We all have good reason to fear (it was almost four years ago when I signed a release to allow the Secret Seervice to have a copy of my psychiatric file to see how dangerous I was) what judgments psychiatrists could use to render our souls, and the history of psychiatry shows that politicians are not the first to have reason to complain. THE FREUD/JUNG LETTERS, Edited by William McGuire, allows us to go way back to 18 December 1912, when Jung wrote to Freud, "I would, however, point out that your technique of treating your pupils like patients is a blunder. In that way you produce either slavish sons or impudent puppies" (Freud/Jung, p. 534). Freud was quite capable, however, of treating the whole world like patients, and with the assistance of William C. Bullitt, who had known Wilson and wanted to write about him, had produced a final draft of this book in 1932.

Those were raw times, and the final text was not settled until Freud and Bullitt met in London in 1939. Religion was a major factor in Wilson's early life, and its benefits are considered "well suited to women and to men whose femininity exceeded their masculinity. . . . A more masculine boy than Tommy Wilson would have felt hostility to the `mores' of the family and community in which the Minister's son was reared; but he felt no impulse to revolt. His masculinity was feeble. . . . He was fortunate to have been born in a nation which was protected from reality during the nineteenth century by inherited devotion to the ideals of Wyclif, Calvin and Wesley." (p. 71). Now the geopolitical superpower keeps acting like Americans have finally faced the conflicts of those who "had been brought up in the comparative freedom of European civilization." (p. 71).

After Wilson's father died, this book pictures Wilson as the personification of the modern American attitude: "he assumed his father's throne, became God in his unconscious and began to act with a sense of his own inevitable righteousness." (p. 78). Wilson's major confrontations followed the pattern of a "neurotic who has lodged a considerable portion of his libido in identification with Christ is apt, when faced by battle and harassed by fear, to take refuge in the comforting illusion that he too by submitting will achieve ultimate victory. He fears to fight. Therefore, through his identification with Christ he convinces himself that he does not need to fight, that by submitting he will achieve his aims. And, if he has not a firm grip on reality, he is apt to convince himself after he has submitted that he has in fact won a victory, although in reality he has suffered complete defeat." (p. 78). This seems weird, applied to Wilson, because America won World War I, just like America overthrew the government of Iraq in 2003, just before a different kind of hell was breaking loose.

"In Paris at the Peace Conference he feared the consequences of fighting. He submitted, then declared that he had won a victory and announced that the Treaty of Versailles was indeed the peace of `absolute justice' which he had set out to establish. His identification of himself with Christ was the mental mechanism which enabled him to reach that somewhat fantastic conclusion." (p. 79).

In my own lifetime, "Peace is at hand" in October 1972 was followed by an agreement in January 1973 which barely qualified as a ceasefire for troops who were Vietnamese, and for the U.S. Congress, which was asked to keep sending money to support an ongoing war. The North Vietnamese never did get money from the U.S. to rebuild for the incidental damage that might have been caused by American strikes from 1964 to 1973, and victory, as it was proclaimed for those in the United States, seemed to the peace crowd to be more like a nefarious (possibly still secret) plan to get the Vietnamese sides to keep fighting each other with a minimum amount of American assistance. Nixon, Kissinger, and Ford might not have the same ultimate motivation as Wilson, but we can expect that each faced "the conflict between his femininity and his exalted Super-Ego which demanded that he should be all masculinity. If we are asked why from time to time his symptoms increased to the point of `breakdown,' we can answer only by generalization that his symptoms increased in severity whenever the events of his life produced a sharpening of the fundamental conflict." (p. 81).

America needs the kind of president who can face such fundamental conflicts without such symptoms, but democracy ought to allow people who don't want America to out-German the Germans at their own personal, political, and geopolitical goals to have a say in how such conflicts could be avoided. Clearly, if we don't want to fight, we should stay out of endless wars. Even Wilson's troubles did not end "the day when he was received in Paris as the Saviour of Mankind" (p. 82). By September, 1919, he was making speeches in which he complained, "The formula of Pan-Germanism, you remember, was Bremen to Bagdad -- Bremen on the North Sea to Bagdad in Persia." (p. 286). Pages 288-289 show his praise of "the glory that is going to attach to the memories of that great American Army . . . will be this noble army of Americans who saved the world!" Now we are supporting an American army in Baghdad that is beginning to realize that Persia is Iran, the country next door, which Americans have been kicked out of before.