You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
This esoteric, unruly title* stems from Woodrow Wilson's famous “Fourteen Points” which were to have been used as guidelines for the victorious Allies to frame a just peace following World War I. I have created arbitrarily fourteen new points to explain the ill-fated psychological study of Wilson written by Sigmund Freud and William C. Bullitt. By a curious twist of fate, three very different and notable lives converged in 1966 with the publication of the book known as Thomas Woodrow Wilson, A Psychological Study by Sigmund Freud and William C. Bullitt (1967). President Wilson and Professor Freud never did meet each other, but Ambassador William C. Bullitt provided their linkage as he had first worked under Wilson and then had been psychoanalyzed by Freud . My goal in this paper is to explain the circumstances under which Freud and Bullitt came to write their psychological study of President Woodrow Wilson. First, I will present the known facts about the Freud/Bullitt collaboration. This will be followed by speculation as to why the Wilson book was judged to have been such a failure and has been both suppressed and ignored by the psychoanalytic establishment.
Before its 1967 publication by Houghton Mifflin, the Wilson book generated considerable prepublication anticipation and
* In choosing this title, I was influenced by Philip Reiff's essay “14 Points on Wilson” that describes the Freud/Bullitt collaboration in writing the Wilson book.
excitement. Dr. Kurt Eissler (1966), Director of the Freud Archives, announced in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis that “one manuscript which has been missing from the Standard Edition—namely, Freud's manuscript which was written in cooperation with Mr. Bullen [sic] about President Wilson—has now been given free and has been studied. I hear that it is a very exciting manuscript and probably will be published within a year or so.”
LOOK Magazine (1966), with a c