Should We Psychoanalyze Our Presidents?
Sigmund Freud had a rule. However irresistible the temptation to burrow into the inner life of kings, prime ministers, and tycoons, he wouldn’t analyze famous contemporaries from afar. It just wasn’t right to rummage around in the mind of a subject who didn’t consent to the practice. But in the end, he found one leader so fascinating and so maddening that his ethical qualms apparently melted away.
From the distance of the present, it’s almost impossible to imagine that Woodrow Wilson was the one public figure whom Freud felt compelled to put on the couch. But that’s because the current prevailing image of the early-20th-century president—an enforcer of white supremacy, an enemy of civil liberties, a man preserved in sepia photographs as an unsmiling prig wearing a pair of pince-nez—is so remote from the near-messianic character that he cut in his day.
When Wilson arrived in France at the end of 1918, one month after the armistice that ended the Great War, he was greeted by adoring crowds hanging out of windows, crowding sidewalks, and chanting his name. “An immense cry of love,” read the six-column headline in Le Petit Parisien. That tableau followed him to every European city he visited. What he represented was, in fact, redemption: the promise of eternal peace and the dawn of a new world order.
Of all the politicians of his day, Wilson most clearly envisioned the better world that could emerge from war, built on values of self-determination and democracy. He not only had the
