The forgotten book by Freud and Bullit

By Fanny Elman Schutt

This book is for anybody who is interested in leaders and how they captivate others. It weaves together important events in the history of the 20th century and psychoanalytical concepts, in order to help us understand the mechanisms and psychical conflicts behind leadership and submission to leaders. In an example from our times, these phenomena can even lead to the extreme of suicidal fanaticism.?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Hakabooks
• Release date: May 1, 2012
• ISBN: 9788415084778

Book preview

Bibliography

Introduction

Woodrow Wilson: A Psychological Study by S. Freud and W. C. Bullitt is, in many ways, an exceptional book.

It is the only book that Freud co-authored with someone who was not a psychoanalyst or a doctor, as his initial collaborator Breuer¹ was and his only work dealing with the biography of a contemporary politician, namely the twenty-eighth President of the United States. Wilson became world renowned because of the peace proposals he put forward after the First World War, but ended up signing a treaty that had disastrous consequences for humanity.

Furthermore, although the authors –S. Freud and W. C. Bullitt– considered the book finished in 1939, it was not published until 1966. The original manuscript was never found, which caused some controversy over whether or not Freud could be considered its author, and was used as a justification for excluding it from his Complete Works.

The guardians of Freud’s legacy, especially the very influential Anna Freud, seemed to have reservations about whether the text signed by her father in 1939 was the same that was published almost 30 years later.

These reservations were picked up by Freud’s biographers and amplified by the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA), the official professional body. Shortly after the book’s publication the IPA designated E. Erickson, a psychoanalyst who had studied under Anna Freud, to review the matter. Erickson, with the support of peers from the same school of thought, published in The International Journal of Psychoanalysis what was to become the book’s epitaph: the consensus was that they did not recognise the style or accept the content, and that, of course, they did not recommend reading it.

Thirty years later a few psychoanalysts and historians were researching Freud’s personal papers –his letters and journal– and found references in them that spoke of his participation and interest in the book, although not without some contradiction. But they concluded that it was a psycho-biography or a clinical history.

If we study this book in light of the rest of Freud’s work, we find paragraphs that are unequivocally his, and others that would appear not to be his work. However, the most important thing is that the ideas in the book, considered as a whole, are a link in the chain of texts that Freud wrote from 1921 onwards, in which he studies issues beyond the workings of the individual’s psyche. In those works Freud links psychoanalysis with mass phenomena like religion, culture and, in the case of this book, politics and ethics.

Freud himself talks about this evolution in an epilogue added to his autobiographical introduction in 1935. He wrote then that in the previous decade he had changed his focus of study, and returned to the social and cultural issues that had fascinated him from a very early age. This shift came after a long period in which he circled around such issues and focused on the disciplines of medicine, biology and psychotherapy.

What Freud humbly described as a detour would be the first part of his life’s work, including his discovery of the unconscious mind, his theory of sexuality, and all of his work on techniques, meta-psychology, and clinical histories, amongst other things. This amounts, in short, to the foundations of the theoretical, technical and clinical aspects of psychoanalysis.

In a second phase of his works he deals with social, religious, cultural and ethical issues. He focuses on the study of the sadistic, aggressive and destructive impulses that stem from the death instinct –a concept he first introduced in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920).

We find notable coherence and continuity between both parts of his work. The book about Wilson could not have been written without the precedents of The Future of an Illusion (1927) and Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921) and those are, in turn, extensions of works such as On Narcissism: An introduction (1914) and Totem and Taboo (1912).

How and when was this forgotten book conceived, however? We have to go back to the summer of 1930, when William C. Bullitt, a North American diplomat, politician and journalist who had met Freud some years before, visited him in Berlin. Bullitt had been part of the delegation that had accompanied Wilson to Versailles, where the superpowers had signed the peace treaty after the First World War (1914-1918). He asked Freud to participate in a psychological-historical study about Wilson.

Bullitt had been personally involved in the drafting of the treaty and, like Freud, was deeply disappointed in Wilson. He was in a position to give Freud a lot of priceless material on the ex-President’s life, and on what had happened behind the scenes in the Versailles negotiations. Freud accepted the proposal and the two men signed a collaboration agreement.

Many biographers focus upon Freud’s health, or the type of surgery he had undergone before Bullitt’s visit. We believe, by contrast, that it is worth situating this meeting within the broader context in which the two men agreed to collaborate.

In 1930, Freud had just finished Civilisation and its Discontents, a text that built upon the work he initiated with The Future of an Illusion, and considers how his ideas on illusion and religion apply to civilisation.

Generally speaking, Freud’s work in this period was increasingly concerned with how events in human society and history are connected to the dynamic conflicts that psychoanalysis studies in the individual. Social phenomena would follow similar processes, only played out on a larger stage. He was at the height of his renown as a thinker, had received the Goethe Prize for literature, and occupied a place of honour in the intellectual history of his time. All of this was taking place against the backdrop of the Great Depression that followed the crash of the New York Stock Exchange, and the increasing influence of the National Socialist Party in Germany.

Freud had been interested in the figure of Wilson since the time that the then-President wrote his famous Fourteen Points. Amongst other things, these Points called for the end of old-school diplomacy, an arrangement to solve the colonial issues, general disarmament and the creation of a League of Nations to promote peace and protect the territorial integrity and independence of its members.

After the end of the War, Freud had suffered the tremendous disappointment of the Treaty of Versailles. He had also been shocked by Wilson’s final process of self-destruction.

Prior to his agreement with Bullitt, Freud corresponded with another North American, William Bayard Hale, who had produced a study on the President’s literary style from the perspective of psychoanalytical categories, which Freud considered inappropriate because it concerned a living public figure. Freud declared then that psychoanalysis should never be used as a political or literary weapon.

There were a number of interruptions and disagreements in the time that passed between the 1930 collaboration agreement and the conclusion of the work in 1939 in London.

Having agreed that the book would not be published while Wilson’s second wife was still alive, the decision over when it was appropriate to publish was placed in Bullitt’s hands. The difficulties that further delayed the publication became his responsibility.

There is no record of the precise disagreements between the two authors, since the manuscript with corrections and annotations seems to have been lost in 1940 when Bullitt, who at that time was acting-US Ambassador to France, left Paris in a hurry with the German army closing in on the city.

We know, however, that the two authors had a serious disagreement over a chapter Freud wrote on the issue of Christianity, which Bullitt rejected. This disagreement is consistent with their different objectives and perspectives. For the diplomat, the aim was to diminish the personal and political stature of Wilson, whom he treated as an adversary. Freud, by contrast, sought to transcend the person of the President and study the interactions between psychoanalysis, ethics and politics.

In Freud’s opinion, Wilson’s religious beliefs played a central role in his personality. But seeming to endorse Freudian perspectives on religion could have put Bullitt in an uncomfortable position, since he had resumed his political career and was working within the administration of the new Democrat President, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. This issue was particularly pertinent because Bullitt had already jeopardised his political career years before by publicly resigning his position in the Versailles negotiating commission, and airing his opinions in an open letter addressed to Wilson. It was after this resignation that Bullitt had travelled to Europe and established his initial contacts, first therapeutic and then personal, with the father of psychoanalysis.

The two authors’ strengths were complementary. While Freud was a great thinker and a man of science, Bullitt was a doer who had been involved in very significant political events. He had negotiated with Lenin and Trotsky after the Russian Revolution and accompanied Wilson to Versailles. Ideologically, Freud and Bullitt shared some views, which we would now consider progressive, as were the ideas that brought Wilson to his second term of office in 1916.

The questions addressed in Woodrow Wilson: A Psychological Study were not raised until 1966-1967, when the book was finally published in Boston, London and Paris, a few months before Bullitt’s death. The Spanish-language edition was first published in Buenos Aires in 1973.

Thirty years after its publication, Elisabeth Roudinesco, who is both an historian and scholar of psychoanalysis, described the study on Wilson as Freud’s greatest work on politics, and amongst his most important works² . The psychoanalyst René Major agrees with this opinion.

In writing about this book, the intention is to explore the reasons for its sustained neglect in the history of psychoanalysis, as well as the text itself and the line of thought that it forms part of. In order to further this understanding, we look at the political circumstances that surrounded its creation and publication.

It could