Wilson Agonistes: The Battle Over Woodrow Wilson

Continuing a long tradition of worldly Europeans condemning naive but dangerous Americans, Sigmund Freud viewed the twenty-eighth president of the United States as nothing less than a global catastrophe. Freud criticized Woodrow Wilson for his messianic religiosity and self-righteousness, concluding that the manner in which his moral absolutism withered in the face of amoral European diplomacy caused much damage to world affairs. Without actually meeting his subject, Freud surmised that Wilson suffered from a variant of the Oedipus complex, which led him to act as a feminized supplicant to Georges Clemenceau and David Lloyd George and as ill-fatedly macho toward domestic opponents such as Henry Cabot Lodge. Freud's not-so-subtle insinuation was that few phenomena are more dangerous than an American president with good intentions, a poor sense of geopolitical reality and unresolved Oedipal drives that would have made Little Hans blush.

Thomas Woodrow Wilson: A Psychological Study, which Freud wrote with the American diplomat William C. Bullitt, was savaged upon publication. Its vitriol is indeed wearying--Freud's psychoanalytic interpretations often amount to wild conjecture based on unreliable hearsay. The renowned historian A.J.P. Taylor dismissed the book as a "disgrace," while Vladimir Nabokov wrote that "I welcome Freud's Woodrow Wilson not only because of its comic appeal, which is great, but because that surely must be the last rusty nail in the Viennese Quack's coffin." Yet despite its flaws, the book is not without scraps of insight:

Nothing mattered except noble intentions. As a result, when [Wilson] crossed the ocean to bring to war-torn Europe a just and lasting peace, he put himself in the deplorable position of the benefactor who wishes to restore the eyesight of the patient but does not know the construction of the eye and has neglected to learn the necessary methods of operation.

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