Freudulence

Jamieson Webster invokes Sigmund Freud and Ambassador William C. Bullitt in an attempt to psychoanalyze political leaders, in an essay from the LARB Quarterly issue no. 42, “Gossip.”

By Jamieson WebsterAugust 24, 2024

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This essay is a preview of the LARB Quarterly, no. 42: Gossip. Become a member for more fiction, essays, criticism, poetry, and art from this issue—plus the next four issues of the Quarterly in print.

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IT’S WELL-WORN KNOWLEDGE that Freud was pessimistic. Add to pessimism, elitism. Freud thought a more truthful relation to one’s true motives was only possible to the select few who were willing to interrogate themselves at all costs. In fact, he was so grandiosely pessimistic that he counted his theories as one of the great blows to mankind along with Copernicus and Darwin: we are not the center of the universe, we are not some unique species set apart from the rest of life on earth, and we are not masters in our own house. Freud’s message is often watered down to mean that there are processes in the mind that we don’t know about, like the way computer software runs in the background, or that there are parts of ourselves that are hidden and only need to be carefully revealed. These gloss the extremity of his actual message that we fundamentally cannot know ourselves—but for the tip of an iceberg.

How does our lack of self-knowledge tip the scales of history? It is important that we know what we don’t know, and what we can’t know. There is no better curb to human hubris. Actions we take might be more ethical if undertaken with a strong sense of our human limitations. As we begin to reckon with the failures of Western democracy, especially regarding the rationality of politics and the fitness of political leaders, could we have a better sense of how little shared knowledge there is?

This is a timely moment for Patrick Weil’s The Madman in the White House: Sigmund Freud, Ambassador Bullitt, and the Lost Psychobiography of Woodrow Wilson (2023), which provides a reassessment of the much-disputed book that Freud and American ambassador William C. Bullitt wrote about Woodrow Wilson, speculating about the president’s mental health. That book, Thomas Woodrow Wilson: A Psychological Study, has been much maligned through the years, renounced by Anna Freud and Erik Erikson, to name a few; the book is not included in the Standard Edition of Freud’s complete works. But reading the two books in tandem makes Freud’s cautionary message regarding human illusions resound, particularly as they affect politics. Since I am a psychoanalyst, you would think that I would know this human impediment intimately, and yet resistance is such that I felt startled revisiting Freud and Bullitt’s basic intuitions about a former American president. The contemporaneity of the book shook me. It was as if they were speaking to our current predicament, close to 100 years later.

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The book on Wilson by Freud and Bullitt was published in 1966, after a tumultuous and obscure path following its completion in 1939. Publication was ostensibly postponed due to Bullitt’s shifting political career. Bullitt, a diplomat who served under Wilson during the First World War, publicly resigned in 1919, later testifying against the president in a Senate hearing on the Treaty of Versailles. In the time leading up to World War II, he was already looking to reenter politics and feared that a book examining the unconscious conflicts that led to devastating diplomatic failures on the part of an American president would stand in the way. The book’s eventual publication was met with skepticism and scorn, as well as endless speculation on the exact nature of the collaboration between the two men. Anna Freud, in a letter to the psychoanalyst Dr. Max Schur (who assisted in Freud’s euthanasia), encouraged his psychoanalytic association not to respond to the reviews: “The sooner the book falls into oblivion the better. We all wish, after all, that it had never turned up. […] The only correct conclusion is that this book was written by Bullitt, and not by my father.”

Weil, a fellow at the Yale Law School, recently found in an unmarked box in Yale’s Bullitt archive what appears to be the original manuscript by Freud and Bullitt, showing the extent of their collaboration. The box includes their notes to one another, as well as smaller signs of their cooperation—both their signatures grace the end of every chapter. Freud clearly assented to a version of the text, which Weil believes was a political act: written during the rise of fascism, the study of Wilson spoke to the popularity of Adolf Hitler.

And yet, this manuscript is significantly different from the book published in 1966 (Weil hopes to publish the original text if copyright issues can be resolved). Weil counts over 300 edits; whole pages were deleted, as well as almost an entire chapter. We can see that the two men argued over the more overt interpretations of Wilson’s sexuality, especially what Freud called his unconscious or passive homosexuality. Some of Freud’s critique of Christianity, especially Christian attitudes of purity, was also edited out, though they originally agreed on these issues as evidenced by their signatures and exchanges. It was simply never a subject in their heated debates.

Bullitt also later edited out some of Freud’s most potent commentary on the psychic life of leaders. Weil speculates that Bullitt, in later life, returned to Christianity feeling that it was the only reasonable stance to fight a “faith” such as communism. The edits were perhaps also a response to a larger-scale reconsideration of Wilson’s legacy. By 1966, Woodrow Wilson had entered a renaissance. His ideas were being touted as a model for the UN and NATO avant la lettre. While this is true—and Freud and Bullitt certainly laud his attempt to broker world peace on a continent caught in a contest over the spoils of war—it is also an act of historical revision.

Prior to this recanonization, an enigma haunted Wilson’s legacy. He botched the Paris peace talks, and the eventual Treaty of Versailles failed to include the United States in the League of Nations—his raison d’être. Wilson allowed Great Britain and France to strip Germany of its territories, reconfigure borders that were sure to destabilize the region, and issue punitive reparations that could never be met. As Freud and Bullitt masterfully show, Wilson had all the cards stacked in his favor and never played even one of them. He had leverage over both countries: they owed money to the United States and needed its approval. He could have forced negotiations into the public, whose support he had, rather than continue behind closed doors. This would have drawn in the participation of other countries and their interests. Wilson seemingly placed no pressure, at any moment, and acquiesced to all their demands. “He may, indeed, never have made any decision,” write Freud and Bullitt, “but merely disintegrated.”

This was a moment of diplomacy so disastrous that many knew it would lead to a second world war. No one understood what Wilson was thinking. For Bullitt and Freud, politics is personal, and the personal is shot through with the familial and the sexual. Religious or political beliefs are a thin cover for a world of inner turmoil. In his cuts and edits, Bullitt appeared to be making a shrewd and timely decision. Arguing about political miscalculations is one thing, but calling a former American president, who was in the process of being recanonized, a puritan whose repressed homosexuality caused a psychotic persecution mania would have been difficult, to say the least—even, or especially, if it explained some of his bizarre capitulations to idealized masculine figures and near-obsessive, self-sabotaging battles with others.

Woodrow Wilson left Paris in 1919, after staying there for most of six months, and soon suffered a breakdown and later a stroke, which weakened him and led to his death. Some have tried to attribute Wilson’s erratic actions to the stroke, but there’s no evidence of that, especially since many of his decisions were made before he became ill. For example, he had his own party vote against a ratification of the treaty that would have corrected the mistakes made in the original agreement (if the United States had ratified the treaty, Wilson could have achieved secondhand what he originally set out to do). But that would require acknowledging his mistakes. As Freud and Bullitt say,

This looks like hypocrisy; but careful examination will show that it was not hypocrisy. Wilson’s apparent hypocrisy was nearly always self-deception. […]

The facts of the war became to him not the actual facts but facts which he invented to express his wishes. From time to time the actual facts rose out of suppression and he drove them back by renewed assertions of the imaginary facts which expressed his desires. He was persuaded by his own words. He began to believe utterly in his phrases. By his words he made many men in many lands believe that the war would end in a just peace, and he made all America “drunk with this spirit of self-sacrifice”; but no man was more deceived or intoxicated by his words than he himself.

Weil’s book, and the manuscript by Bullitt and Freud, offer a unique interpretation among the many attempts to understand Wilson’s will to self-sabotage, which then led to one of the most catastrophic events in modern history. And the implications are radical. If the problem is not hypocrisy, cynical politics, or ignorance and political missteps, but rather a man’s divorce from reality, what do we do about that? We’re still trying to answer this question.

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Why did Bullitt sanitize the text? Why did he keep the original version, which could eventually be discovered? No doubt for his own unconscious, self-sabotaging reasons. Freud was, after all, his psychoanalyst. Importantly, Bullitt was instrumental to Freud and his family being able to leave Vienna safely for London in 1938. Bullitt claimed that he received the final blessing for the manuscript when he met Freud in London; the letters between Freud, Bullitt, and Freud’s daughter Anna, a psychoanalyst herself, seem to prove this.

Bullitt lived a remarkable life between 1932 and 1966, working for Franklin D. Roosevelt as the first American ambassador to the Soviet Union and ambassador to France during World War II. When he was refused service in the United States Army, he joined the Free French Forces and served under General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny. He was with the general at the signing of the German Instrument of Surrender. Following the war, he was increasingly alarmed by communism, which moved him politically towards the right. When Eisenhower won the election, he didn’t give Bullitt an appointment, feeling that his views on Russia and China were too extreme. By 1964, after Barry Goldwater had lost by a landslide, Bullitt was forced to admit that his political career was over. He was 73 years old.

Two years later, Bullitt finally decided to attempt to publish the book on Wilson and sent a draft to Anna Freud, who edited it along the lines of a well-known letter by her father (who wrote that Bullitt’s prose was repetitive and somewhat tedious, and so it is). She otherwise approved of the work. Bullitt rejected her emendations, and though she did not back away from publishing the text as her father’s, she eventually turned her back on it (her letters demonstrate that clearly). We now know that she never saw the original version of the manuscript; Bullitt misled her into believing that his version was the text Freud had approved.

In his book, Weil uses a variety of letters to show that some people claimed that Bullitt only received Freud’s blessing because he felt obliged to Bullitt for saving him and his family from the SS. The psychoanalytic world later distanced itself from the published book, and most psychoanalysts I know have never read it. No one could believe that Freud collaborated in writing something so seemingly mediocre, a work that bears none of the elegance of his style of writing or thinking. At best, they claimed, he had served as a consultant for Bullitt.

Erik Erikson, winner of the National Book Award for his psychobiography of Gandhi, wrote a damning review in The New York Review of Books. “The ‘joint’ attempt,” he wrote, “to treat the whole scene at Versailles as a stage for one man’s danse macabre does not clarify the workings of history.” Quoting the book at length in exasperation, Erikson finally pronounces “enough”—adding, however, that the book’s failure is a pity since some of the parent-child dynamics suggested in it do tend to haunt the lives of those with a messianic bent, such as Wilson. Erikson mourns what could have been, since psychological insight into matters of war and peace is indispensable. But this, he says, is not available here.

Freud’s interest in Wilson was, in itself, quite out of character, given Freud’s unrelenting suspicion of the United States and general pessimism about politics. Freud himself admitted that he had high hopes about Wilson’s peace mission, though he was promptly disillusioned. Erikson writes that Freud must have felt a “Moses-like indignation” at all false Christian prophecy. “What he heard from Bullitt about Wilson (with whom Bullitt had broken in Paris, as the book recounts) convinced Freud that Wilson’s policies represented the epitome of ‘Christian science applied to politics.’”

One can certainly imagine the interest and excitement Freud took in his new American patient’s tales of his time with Woodrow Wilson. Before they began writing together, Freud had lauded Bullitt’s play The Tragedy of Woodrow Wilson as brilliant, noting that it should be staged with “a hurricane of passion, like an anxiety-dream.” Aside from Freud’s early work with Josef Breuer for Studies in Hysteria (1895), this is his only other collaboration. The sad truth is that what Bullitt purged from the 1966 text were Freud’s most stringent critiques of Christian politics (Erikson sensed this but couldn’t prove it, and now we can see the full extent of the purges). Seeing the redacted pages in Weil’s book, there is no doubt in my mind that the hand behind these passages is Freud’s.

Freud did not live to see the publication of the Wilson book, a fact that Erikson claimed was just further evidence of “Freudulence.” Bullitt’s edits certainly make for a less elegant and less complex work, but the essence of Freud’s thought is still there. Bullitt watered down the passages about Wilson’s puritanical beliefs and toned down Freud’s argument that Wilson’s blindness to his bisexuality and castration fears made effective political leadership nearly impossible. Instead, Wilson emerges as someone with rote daddy issues, without the sting of the broader implications Freud lent to these ideas. The book reads like a case study that happens to be political, not a study of a case with broader political implications.

And yet, Freud’s Moses-like indignation, his calculated reserve about what is democratically possible, reverberates in our contemporary political landscape. And here is where the real value of the book lies.

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Freud was distrustful of the United States for two reasons: money and religion. This sentiment appears again and again in his letters. In a letter to Carl Jung on December 3, 1910, Freud complained that the flat, sterile, insipid objections to his theories were the same on either side of the Atlantic. He mused: “In our studies of America, have we ever looked into the source of the energies they develop in practical life? I believe it is the early dissolution of family ties, which prevents all the erotic components from coming to life and banishes the Graces from the land.” The particular prudishness of Americans, the heavy repression of their erotic lives, made them ripe for the “unbridled pursuit of money and possessions,” as well as the pursuit of technological advances that render every obstacle illusory. To live like an American means “no time for the libido.” As many have pointed out, what Freud failed to see was that his theories wouldn’t be rejected by the US; they would be assimilated and turned towards the ends of efficiency, profit, and more repressiveness.

In fact, this was the most complete way to neutralize Freud. Freud detested the idea of psychoanalysis being adapted to the haste of American life and their zeal for cutting corners. He imagined the situation being like a fire brigade dealing with a house fire by removing the lamp that started it.

Freud was also fond of a joke about America, noted in his 1905 book Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious and repeated during his 1909 lectures at Clark University in Massachusetts (though he edited out the bit saying that the joke was specifically about Americans):

Here is an American anecdote: “Two not particularly scrupulous business men had succeeded, by dint of a series of highly risky enterprises, in amassing a large fortune, and they were now making efforts to push their way into good society. One method, which struck them as a likely one, was to have their portraits painted by the most celebrated and highly paid artist in the city, whose pictures had an immense reputation. The precious canvases were shown for the first time at a large evening party, and the two hosts themselves led the most influential connoisseur and art critic up to the wall upon which the portraits were hanging side by side, to extract his admiring judgment on them. He studied the works for a long time, and then, shaking his head, as though there was something he had missed, pointed to the gap between the pictures and asked quietly: ‘But where’s the Saviour?’”

Freud liked the joke because it plays on absence: the space between the paintings is also the absent image of Christ hanging between two thieves. Americans, in his view, were always asking where the savior is. In the book on Wilson, the punch line would take an entirely different tone. For Freud, Wilson, who arrived in Paris as a savior, also clearly had a God complex, and was himself caught between Britain’s prime minister David Lloyd George and France’s president Georges Clemenceau.

Bullitt erased Freud’s final line in the book: “Facts are more useful than faiths. Truth is a better ally than any deity.” Wilson, as US president, imported a particularly American God complex into politics. Since then, we have seen this phenomenon repeated many times. Consider the watershed moment when George W. Bush, a born-again Christian, said that Jesus Christ was his favorite philosopher, which preceded the Oedipal fiasco of his attempt to finish his father’s war in Iraq. Barack Obama’s bid for the presidency was laced with messianic hope. Donald Trump seems to elicit similar feelings, but from the other side. His father’s name was Fred Christ Trump—Christ being the maiden name of his maternal German grandmother.

Race also plays a peculiar, important role in this dynamic. Freud commented once on the importance of Jung’s study of America and the special repressions of white Americans living side by side with Black Americans. A great deal of critical studies of American racism have come to rely on psychoanalysis (even as psychoanalysis in this country became a profession dominated by white men). Weil brings race into his reading of the Freud and Bullitt text, noting an important detail about Wilson that Freud and Bullitt had bypassed but which follows their theory closely. Wilson grew up in the South during the Civil War and was the first president from the region to be elected president following that war. He had a submissive reverence for General Jan Smuts—a racist South African soldier and statesman, and apparently a force capable of making Wilson capitulate almost instantaneously. Weil writes, “Smuts’s lofty purpose was to unify white Christian ‘civilization.’ Like Wilson, who moralized like a pastor while rejecting racial and gender equality, Smuts spoke a language of universal rights that applied in practice only to whites.”

Ultimately, the Paris peace talks were not immune to the idiosyncrasies of American politics, which were saturated with puritanism, money, misogyny, and racism. According to Weil, Smuts seduced Wilson into agreeing to strip Germany of their colonies, destroy their navy, and, through tortured logic, force Germany to cover British pensions and other payments to civilians. “It was after surrendering to Smuts on reparations that Wilson suffered his collapse,” Weil writes. Freud and Bullitt describe a man gripped by extreme paranoia, entering into a mania of speechmaking, claiming that the treaty was a masterpiece: “It is so much of a people’s peace that in every portion of its settlement every thought of aggrandizement […] on the part of the great powers was brushed aside. […] They did not claim a single piece of territory.” They write that “he was very close to psychosis.”

Wilson eventually suffered from thrombosis on the right side of his brain, paralyzing the left side of his body. This was the last of a series of physical and mental breakdowns—each carefully detailed by Freud and Bullitt and all marked by similar forms of conflict, delusion, and manic speechifying. “The Woodrow Wilson who lived on was a pathetic invalid, a querulous old man full of rage and tears, hatred and self-pity.” In a final interview with Wilson in October 1923, a few months before his death, the only person the former president felt worthy of singling out by name was Jan Smuts. Freud writes in the introduction,

We all know that we are not fully responsible for the results of our acts. We act with a certain intention; then our act produces results which we did not intend and could not have foreseen. Thus often we reap more blame and disrepute, and occasionally more praise and honor than we deserve. But when, like Wilson, a man achieves almost the exact opposite of that which he wished to accomplish, when he has shown himself to be the true antithesis of the power which “always desires evil and always creates good,” when a pretension to free the world from evil ends only in a new proof of the danger of a fanatic to the commonweal, then it is not to be marveled at that a distrust is aroused in the observer which makes sympathy impossible. […]

A measure of sympathy developed; but sympathy of a special sort mixed with pity, such as one feels when reading Cervantes for his hero, the naïve cavalier of La Mancha. And finally, when one compared the strength of the man to the greatness of the task which he had taken upon himself, this pity was so overwhelming that it conquered every other emotion. Thus, in the end, I am able to ask the reader not to reject the work which follows as a product of prejudice.

This is sober Freud. It is as if we can see him taking pity on little Tommy Wilson, on all of us.

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There’s a funny phrase that Freud and Bullitt use throughout the text: “double identification” or, sometimes, a “double helping” of identification, as if identification tended towards gluttony. Identification—recognizing oneself in another—poses certain problems in psychoanalysis because it is easily confused with a fantastical version of the other person, and can also be a way of refusing to differentiate oneself and separate from them. Ultimately, it is fueled by narcissism and disavowed aggression—a way for the libido to not quite leave the self in the direction of the world, where it finds its limit. Wilson, they claim, morbidly identified with his father. On top of this, he also needed to find a younger man to identify with himself and then love as he wished his father had loved him (hence, “double identification”).

Thus, Wilson, who did not bear a son, was always father and son both. He remained close to his father throughout his life, unable to make decisions without consulting him. Wilson once wrote to his father:

I recognize the strength growing in me as of the nature of your strength […] and I feel daily more and more bent toward creating in my own children that combined respect and tender devotion for their father that you gave your children for you. Oh, how happy I should be, if I could make them think of me as I think of you!

This manic exaltation—a pure narcissistic circle—also hides an extreme aggression that was never openly expressed by Wilson towards his father. Wilson had long suffered from psychosomatic symptoms related to stress, including mysterious headaches and crippling indigestion, but these worsened after his father died, eventually resulting in a hemorrhage in his eye, which presaged his later series of strokes. And throughout his life, Wilson carried on his most intimate relationships with younger men: Professor John Grier Hibben in his Princeton years and Colonel Edward House during his presidency. “His thoughts and mine are one,” Wilson wrote of House.

Identification cannot face the conflicts it is meant to resolve, and thus cannot bear open challenge. Wilson’s most bitter feelings of persecution manifested when Hibben and House expressed differences of opinion, which he took as an absolute betrayal. If you were Wilson’s enemy, there were no lengths he would not go to ensure your defeat, even to his own detriment. Through these repetitively loved and hated men, Wilson was fighting against what Freud and Bullitt called his passive homosexuality, even as he married and had a family.

Taking this further, the double dose of identification also created a powerful unconscious identification with Jesus Christ—not merely because Wilson’s father was a Presbyterian minister (and so a representative of God) nor because all children view their parents as godlike but rather because, for Jesus Christ, submission to the father meant absolute triumph. For Freud, the Oedipus complex forces a man to confront conflicting and incompatible desires to submit to and be loved by one’s father, as well as to oust him. These strains find an acceptable unconscious form in the double identification that Christ offers as submissive son and God-the-father.

Freud always maintained the theory of universal human bisexuality. This also provided a foundation for his interpretation of the appeal of Christianity: each of us has to find an outlet for masculine and feminine wishes: “In many cases a man whose passivity to his father has found no direct outlet discharges it through identification with Jesus Christ. Psychoanalysis has discovered that this identification is present in entirely normal persons.” It is around these questions of bisexuality that Bullitt redacted a great deal of material. For example, he did not include the following passages from Freud’s first chapter (but which are included in the unpublished manuscript):

It is perhaps no accident that with the worldwide spread of Christendom during the first centuries after the birth of Christ an extraordinary decline in the direct expression of homosexuality coincided with its official suppression. Its direct expression simply had become unnecessary. Identifying with Christ gave expression to homosexuality in a manner that not only found social approval but also must have been acceptable to the superego, which always strives to resemble God. Christ is, after all, the perfect reconciliation between masculinity and femininity. Belief in his divinity includes the belief that one can realize the wildest dreams of activity by means of the utmost passivity; by submitting unreservedly to the father, one triumphs over him and becomes God oneself. This mechanism of reconciling opposing impulses of masculinity in the constitutionally bisexual human being by identifying with Christ is something so satisfying that it assures the Christian religion a long existence. People will not readily be willing to give up something that rescues them from the most difficult conflict they have to grapple with. They will continue to identify with Christ for a long time to come.

This is a stunning passage. Freud lauds Christianity for the staying power of its particular brand of sublimation. “Perfect,” he calls it, noting that it rescues us from the most difficult conflict we have to grapple with—though I think he’s using a slightly ironic tone unique to him. But he also means what he says, for this avoidance is part of the ongoing processes of human civilization—processes that are long-standing and durable.

As Weil notes, the problem for Bullitt wasn’t suggesting that Wilson struggled with latent homosexual wishes. Certainly both of the authors accord no blame for this, only pointing out that, could Wilson have recognized this side of himself, he might have avoided some of the damages he caused. “The problem,” writes Weil, lay in suggesting that Wilson’s “homosexuality was associated with Christ and Christianity. […] To derive an interpretation of Christianity from a psychoanalysis concluding that Wilson was a passive homosexual would have attracted considerable dispute, if not alarm.” This is no doubt true, but I also think that Freud’s idea of bisexuality is still radical, claiming as it does that both heterosexuality and homosexuality are contingent phenomena. A man who seems intensely feminine can be heterosexual, while a seemingly macho man can be homosexual. The variations, as we know today, are infinite.

In the unpublished version of the manuscript, Freud wrote: “If human bisexuality necessarily appears to us at times as a heavy burden and the source of endless difficulties, we must not forget that without it human society could not exist at all.” In fact, it is human bisexuality that holds the promise of uniting all races into one great brotherhood for Freud. The problem then is not bisexuality, homosexuality, or heterosexuality. Freud writes, “They exist. That is all. […] Like the universe, the bisexuality of mankind has to be accepted.” The ultimate problem is the repression of bisexuality, which can drive persecutory paranoia: “The habit […] is an easy one to acquire and produced dangerous divorces from reality. The sacrosanct repressed area tends always to annex adjacent territory until only facts which accord with desires can be recognized. [Wilson] lost his mental integrity.”

Only for Christ, write Freud and Bullitt, does submission lead to conquering the world. This is not the case for mere mortals, and Wilson was not Christ. They claimed that Wilson’s delusional submission to power, in his misguided Christian sense that submission is actually the rationalized epitome of power, was a losing prospect. This kind of psychological dynamic would have rendered him useless from the beginning and would never have made for an effective negotiator in the subtle game of international diplomacy. And what guided Wilson was not any Christian ideal of universal love or peace—he was, as we have seen, quite vindictive—but rather an “ideal of purity” that acted as a screen allowing him to avoid fears of castration and homosexuality. Wilson spoke of himself as a man of great intensity restrained only by his ideal of purity. Not only does such delusional narcissism tend to make these men impotent with women; this ideal is also never strong enough to hold back a powerful libido (think of all the abuse committed by supposedly chaste members of the clergy). “Such [pure] men do not exist,” write Freud and Bullitt in their unpublished draft.

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I once heard of a psychoanalyst who worked for the US Navy screening applicants for service on submarines. According to the story, he was assessing for severely repressed homosexual conflicts that could lead to a psychotic break given the proximity of men in close quarters, deep in the ocean, for long stretches of time. It strikes me as rather miraculous that, at one time, we could have recognized this as a problem to be concerned with.

It also happens that US involvement in World War I was initiated by the sinking of the RMS Lusitania by a German submarine in 1915. At that point, Wilson believed that he was already on the verge of establishing peace, right up to the moment when Germany declared unrestricted submarine warfare. This was one of the first signs during his presidency of his trenchant capacity for denial. Would he have been allowed on a submarine? And if not, should he have been allowed in the White House?

Freud’s final works during his lifetime were dedicated to the force of denial, as well as to an investigation of religion, and the psychobiography of Wilson provides an important antecedent. If the ego can completely split from reality, believing two contradictory ideas at once, then rationalization runs deep. In fact, this kind of splitting has a lot to do with our inability to reckon with our own bisexuality. Thus, splitting goes all the way down. “[F]rom the point of view of ‘success in life,’” writes Freud, “psychic disturbance may actually be an advantage.”

The United States “needed [someone] who could speak as if he were ‘God’s mouthpiece on earth,’” Freud and Bullitt point out, and while Wilson’s obsessive speechmaking was absurd, he nevertheless swayed crowds. Politics is seduction by means of the very psychic disturbance of our leaders. It is not merely that we, the audience, may be hypnotized by what leaders say, but rather that they may well be under their own spell, weaving a delusion with their words to further insulate themselves from reality. We would, of course, do better to pay attention to their actions than to their rhetoric. More importantly, it may benefit us to know that our own struggles play into our fascination with our leaders.

Freud issues to us his words of caution:

[A] neurosis is an unstable foundation upon which to build a life. Although history is studded with the names of neurotics, monomaniacs and psychotics who have risen suddenly to power, they have usually dropped as suddenly to disgrace. Wilson was no exception to this rule. The qualities of his defects raised him to power; but the defects of his qualities made him, in the end, not one of the world’s greatest men but a great fiasco.

We must consider, not declarations and claims, but a leader’s character and capacity to act under great duress. Even a minimal amount of genuine insight into themselves on the part of our leaders would be hugely reassuring these days. That, and a relative absence of pomp and promise.

Weil ends his book with a quote from a letter by noted author and newspaper editor Frank C. Waldrop contesting a bad review in The Washington Post of the Wilson psychobiography. For Waldrop, the book laid bare how the secrets of the soul define our natures; it made most histories look “pallid and incomplete.” “Dictators are easy to read. Democratic leaders are more difficult to decipher. However, they can be just as unbalanced as dictators and can play a truly destructive role in our history,” writes Weil.

Freud hoped that a feeling for the diversity of mental life would make us more just and less destructive. He could have admired the melting pot of American multiculturalism, but Freud was judicious with his hopes—Wilson was probably the last leader he allowed himself to be seduced by. In the end, Freud said that he did not really know if we could tolerate the diversity of human constitutions, a diversity that becomes the impetus for war. I am certain that Freud did not think that the United States’ myopic puritanism and greed were fit for the bill. Certainly not then, but the real question is—what about now?

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Featured image: Charles Lacey. [Thoughtograph, or Psychic Photograph], 1894–98. Gilman Collection, Gift of The Howard Gilman Foundation, 2005, The Met Museum (2005.100.982). CC0, metmuseum.org. Accessed August 20, 2024. Image has been cropped.