Games Some People Play

THOMAS WOODROW WILSON by Sigmund Freud and William C. Bullitt. 307 pages. Houghton Mifflin. $6.

It would be hard to find a literary collaboration more ill conceived than this one--a psychoanalytic post-mortem conducted on a U.S. President by two men who were admittedly prejudiced against their subject, and based on second-or third-hand information. Together, they framed a savage posthumous assault that depicts Thomas Woodrow Wilson as a Messianic but effeminate zealot hovering on the brink of insanity. It is all the more remarkable because it is not the work of some pop-psych practitioner but bears the name of the founder of psychoanalysis himself. On this showing, if not on others, Freud puts psychoanalysis in the category of myth and poetry rather than that of scientific examination.

Idealistic Aide. William C. Bullitt, now 75, at the end of World War I was an idealistic young State Department aide whose distinguished diplomatic career as Franklin Roosevelt's Ambassador to Soviet Russia and France still lay in the future. He served briefly on Wilson's peace commission in Paris but was aghast at what he considered the President's capitulation to the vengeful demands of Germany's European conquerors. Moreover, Bullitt had extracted from Lenin what he took to be a promise to limit the spread of Bolshevism substantially to Moscow and its environs. When he broughtthis message to Wilson, the President showed no interest.

In a stiff letter of resignation to Wilson, Bullitt expressed his concern that "our government has consented now to deliver the suffering peoples of the world to new oppressions, subsections and dismemberments." To illustrate his conviction, he began organizing a book about Wilson, Lenin, Clemenceau, Orlando and Lloyd George.

When Bullitt confided his purpose to his friend Sigmund Freud, the Viennese psychiatrist instantly fell in with the idea. Indeed, he took charge: he wanted to set a hand to the chapter about Wilson. In the ensuing collaboration, the chapter became the book. Wilson had fascinated Freud since his discov ery that they were born in the same year--1856--and, more particularly, he blamed Wilson because his personal estate of $30,000 had dwindled away into nothing during the inflationary postwar period. Freud candidly confesses his bias in this book: "The figure of the American President, as it rose above the horizons of Europeans, was from the beginning unsympathetic to me, and this aversion increased the more severely we suffered from the consequences of his intrusion into our destiny."

As their work took form, the coauthors disputed over its content. Ten years passed. In 1938, at a final meeting in London, they reached agreement, but out of compassion decided to defer publication until the death of Wlison's second wife, Edith Gait. She died five years ago, and the book--presumably unrevised since 1938--has now been released.

God & the Son. The authors base their psychoanalysis on the premise that "Tommy Wilson's father was the great love object" of his life. A spellbinding Presbyterian minister who led family-prayer sessions five times a day, the Rev. Joseph Ruggles Wilson came to assume the dimensions of deity in the eyes of his worshipful first son. "Until after he was 40," writes Ray Stannard Baker, the official Wilson biographer quoted in this volume, "Woodrow Wilson never made an important decision of any kind without first seeking his father's advice."

This relationship cast Wilson's father as God, and demanded that the son view himself as Christ, the son of God --or so say Freud and Bullitt. At the same time, this too-deep devotion to his father caused young Tommy Wilson to suppress the aggressive instincts that a growing boy normally directs against his male parent. The authors state flatly that Wilson "never had a fist fight in his life" and did not participate in sports or games of any kind, although they contradict themselves later. Bullitt and Freud insist that Wilson grew up virtually shorn of the traits of manliness; his use of gentle persuasion rather than forcefulness was to them a sure sign that feminine characteristics had taken the upper hand.

Feminine Mind. Everything that Wilson ever did or said is explained against this matrix. In a letter to his first wife, Wilson referred to "the flutter and restlessness" of his spirits. By using the word "flutter," Wilson betrayed a quality "so feminine in its connotations that one should hesitate to employ it to describe a man." When Wilson ascribed to Premier Clemenceau "a kind of feminine mind," Freud-Bullitt call this "clearly an attempt to persuade himself that his own behavior was not feminine by transferring his own attitude to Clemenceau."

Wilson found it difficult "to maintain friendly relations with men of superior intellect or position," write the authors. Why? They were father figures against whom he could vent the repressed hostility toward his own father, which, as any amateur Freudian knows, lurked behind the ostentatious affection. "Wilson's immoderate Super-Ego demanded from him the impossible." Why? "Because he was the son of God." Faced with aggressive (that is, masculine) resistance to his peace program, he practiced the feminine strategy of capitulation. Why? "His unconscious desire to be Christ invented the comforting theory that he could obtain all that he wished without a fight, that he could hand all his weapons to his enemies and convert them by that noble gesture into saints." Describing Wilson's 1919 cross-country campaign to plead his case for a League of Nations, the authors observe: "One may be sure that in his unconscious, when he boarded the train he was mounting an ass to ride into Jerusalem."

Blurred Picture. There is scarcely a rational way to accommodate such statements. It turns out that neither Freud nor Bullitt was aware of the existence of certain Wilson diaries and correspondence that would have been essential to their study. Besides, modern psychiatry has so enlarged on Freud's elementary understanding of the psyche that experts now would find his arguments embarrassingly simplistic. It is certain that no responsible psychoanalyst today--even given only the data that Freud had to work with--would reach the same conclusions.

Look magazine last month invited a rebuttal from Allen Dulles, former CIA chief, who knew the President. "Wilson had his frailties," wrote Dulles, "and Freud's study perhaps helps us to understand their emotional origins, but the total picture of a great figure in our history is blurred. In this study, great areas of Wilson's thought and actions, and his dynamic idealism, are passed over in silence."

Silence, indeed, is a virtue that Freud and Bullitt should have practiced to the end. Their cruel and graceless book has managed grossly to distort the character of a man while--at least in this instance --reducing psychoanalysis to the level of a fantastic parlor game.

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