Notes Toward a Psychoanalytic Perspective on Three Virginia “Founding Fathers”

The pattern of events that marked American politics from the start of the Revolution in 1775 to the end of the presidency of James Monroe a half century later has been noted as a case of American “exceptionalism” by those who shaped it, by later historians, and by psychoanalysts.

The founders of the new republic were familiar with the tendency of revolutionary war leaders to impose authoritarian controls on those who had helped put them in power once the battle was won. They had studied the history of ancient Greek and Roman republics “with sensations of horror … at the rapid succession of revolutions by which they were kept in a state of perpetual vibration between the extremes of tyranny and anarchy” (Hamilton, Madison, and Jay, 1788, p. 312).

Those who led the American Revolution resolved to break from this pattern. A French traveler to the young confederacy hailed their success: “The American Revolution has nothing in common with all those which preceded it … not the same origin nor the same aims nor the same outcome … not even the same men: their manner of thinking is different” (Mandrillon, 1784, pp. 18-19).

What inspired admiration in observers of the American scene was the unusual duality of the roles played by the revolutionary leaders—first as antiauthoritarian rebels, zealously supporting or actually wielding violence, and next as republican nation-builders, defining, establishing, and then self-consciously conforming to legal and political restraints on their powers.

A psychoanalytical model for the expected cycle of tyranny-revolution-parricide-tyranny was implicit in Freud's (1913) exploration of certain myths and fetishistic practices in prehistory and in tribal societies. His speculations were extended to psychopolitical theory by Ernest Jones (1951) who sought to explain the destructive proclivities so often characteristic of revolutionary leaders.