Book & podcast collection

The Madman in the White House: Sigmund Freud, Ambassador Bullitt, and the Lost Psychobiography of Woodrow Wilson

byPatrick Weil

Patrick Weil reconstructs the collaboration between Sigmund Freud and diplomat William C. Bullitt on a secret psychological study of Woodrow Wilson. Bullitt's disillusionment after the Paris Peace Conference and Freud's theories produced a portrait of the president as emotionally unstable, rigid, and driven by paternal conflict. The manuscript's strange history illuminates diplomacy, psychoanalysis, personal grievance, and the temptation to explain political failure through personality. Weil uses newly available evidence to assess their claims and asks what this lost psychobiography reveals about Wilson, its authors, and the dangers of diagnosing leaders from afar.

Publisher

Harvard University Press

Publication date

2023

Format

Print edition

Pages

—

ISBN

9780674291614