George Prochnik: Would Freud's take on Wilson apply to Bush?
[George Prochnik is the author of “Putnam Camp: Sigmund Freud, James Jackson Putnam and the Purpose of American Psychology.”]
“WHEN a pretension to free the world from evil ends only in a new proof of the danger of a fanatic to the commonweal, then it is not to be marveled at that a distrust is aroused in the observer which makes sympathy impossible.”
This bit of mordant critique does not come from a spectator of the current quagmire in Iraq, but from the founder of psychoanalysis, reflecting on the negotiations that concluded World War I and helped lay the groundwork for World War II. Today, on the 151st anniversary of Freud’s birthday — and a little more than four years since President Bush delivered his “Mission Accomplished” speech — we might do well to revisit an aspect of Freud’s thought that has been obscured by the more strident arguments for and against his overarching theory of the mind.
“Thomas Woodrow Wilson,” a biography of America’s 28th president that Freud wrote over the last decade of his life with a young diplomat named William C. Bullitt, is among the least-read volumes in the psychoanalytic canon. But in it Freud, the perennial foe of politics conducted under the mantle of divine inspiration, provided lessons even for those skeptical of Freud himself.
Bullitt had served under Wilson on the American Peace Commission in Paris in 1919, but resigned his post to protest the terms of the treaty, from its reparation clauses to its reapportionment of territory. He became acquainted with Freud in Berlin in the 1920s and mentioned to him that he’d decided to write about the negotiations. Before Bullitt broached the subject, Freud, already suffering from cancer of the jaw, had been lamenting that his own death would be insignificant since he had nothing more to say. But as Bullitt described his idea, in which studies of the principal actors at Versailles would elucidate the reasons behind the treaty’s failure, “Freud’s eyes brightened,” Bullitt recalled, “and he became very much alive.” Freud implored Bullitt to allow him to write the chapter on Wilson.
What stirred Freud to undertake this project at a moment of tremendous strain on his time and energies? In the book’s introduction, Freud recounted an incident in which Wilson, as president-elect, deflected a colleague who had mentioned how he had contributed to the success of Wilson’s campaign. “God ordained that I should be the next president of the United States,” Wilson retorted. “Neither you nor any other mortal or mortals could have prevented it.”
Freud remarked: “I do not know how to avoid the conclusion that a man who is capable of taking the illusions of religion so literally and is so sure of a special personal intimacy with the Almighty is unfitted for relations with ordinary children of men. As everyone knows, the hostile camp during the war also sheltered a chosen darling of Providence: the German kaiser. It was most regrettable that later on the other side a second appeared. No one gained thereby: respect for God was not increased.”...
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“WHEN a pretension to free the world from evil ends only in a new proof of the danger of a fanatic to the commonweal, then it is not to be marveled at that a distrust is aroused in the observer which makes sympathy impossible.”
This bit of mordant critique does not come from a spectator of the current quagmire in Iraq, but from the founder of psychoanalysis, reflecting on the negotiations that concluded World War I and helped lay the groundwork for World War II. Today, on the 151st anniversary of Freud’s birthday — and a little more than four years since President Bush delivered his “Mission Accomplished” speech — we might do well to revisit an aspect of Freud’s thought that has been obscured by the more strident arguments for and against his overarching theory of the mind.
“Thomas Woodrow Wilson,” a biography of America’s 28th president that Freud wrote over the last decade of his life with a young diplomat named William C. Bullitt, is among the least-read volumes in the psychoanalytic canon. But in it Freud, the perennial foe of politics conducted under the mantle of divine inspiration, provided lessons even for those skeptical of Freud himself.
Bullitt had served under Wilson on the American Peace Commission in Paris in 1919, but resigned his post to protest the terms of the treaty, from its reparation clauses to its reapportionment of territory. He became acquainted with Freud in Berlin in the 1920s and mentioned to him that he’d decided to write about the negotiations. Before Bullitt broached the subject, Freud, already suffering from cancer of the jaw, had been lamenting that his own death would be insignificant since he had nothing more to say. But as Bullitt described his idea, in which studies of the principal actors at Versailles would elucidate the reasons behind the treaty’s failure, “Freud’s eyes brightened,” Bullitt recalled, “and he became very much alive.” Freud implored Bullitt to allow him to write the chapter on Wilson.
What stirred Freud to undertake this project at a moment of tremendous strain on his time and energies? In the book’s introduction, Freud recounted an incident in which Wilson, as president-elect, deflected a colleague who had mentioned how he had contributed to the success of Wilson’s campaign. “God ordained that I should be the next president of the United States,” Wilson retorted. “Neither you nor any other mortal or mortals could have prevented it.”
Freud remarked: “I do not know how to avoid the conclusion that a man who is capable of taking the illusions of religion so literally and is so sure of a special personal intimacy with the Almighty is unfitted for relations with ordinary children of men. As everyone knows, the hostile camp during the war also sheltered a chosen darling of Providence: the German kaiser. It was most regrettable that later on the other side a second appeared. No one gained thereby: respect for God was not increased.”...