The Madman in the White House: Patrick Weil, The Madman in the White House: Sigmund Freud, Ambassador Bullitt, and the Lost Psychobiography of Woodrow Wilson (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 2023;  387 pp.)

French political scientist Patrick Weil's Madman in the White House charts the production, stillbirth and resurrection of a psychobiography of the 28th President of the US, Woodrow Wilson, written by Sigmund Freud and a (then) prominent American diplomat, William C. Bullitt.

The biography was conceived in the mid-1920s when Bullitt, a delegate to the Paris peace conference after World War I, sought treatment from Freud. Written over several years, the manuscript for what would eventually be titled Thomas Woodrow Wilson: A Psychological Study was ready for publication in 1932. Yet, by mutual consent, the authors decided not to publish it, as its appearance would bar Bullitt from senior posts in any future Democratic administration. For the next 35 years, during which Freud died and Bullitt's state career waxed and waned, the manuscript sat locked away. Finally, in 1966, as Bullitt himself was dying, he decided to publish it. Its appearance in January 1967 ‘created an immediate firestorm’ in the psychoanalytical community and in national dailies and literary journals (p. 256). Yet unbeknownst to almost all, Bullitt had made hundreds of changes to the manuscript that he and Freud originally approved. A chance discovery by Weil of the original text, unseen by anyone still alive, inspired him to ‘investigate how the original work was conceived, to measure [Freud's] contribution’ and to understand why the published version was so altered by Bullitt, so many years after Wilson's death (p. 9). Weil seeks also to gauge the

quality of Freud's and Bullitt's historical analysis, especially in relation to Wilson's role in the peace negotiations. While meeting these objectives, Madman exa