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This volume is first of all a curious antique. It was written in 1932 and preserved in toto until the death of the second Mrs. Wilson. The mountain of scholarship that has accumulated in the last thirty-five years is completely ignored. As history, the book is mediocre, and undocumented. There is small modesty in Bullitt's assertion: “Thanks to their assistance (secret and unrevealed) we felt confident that, although subsequent publication of private papers would amplify and deepen knowledge of Wilson's character, no new facts would come to light which could conflict vitally with the facts upon we base our study.” Bullitt, a self-acknowledged and bitter enemy of Woodrow Wilson, was also a poor scholar, and in gathering the facts for Freud to interpret he overlooked data already in publication that were not favorable to his thesis.
Armed with 20-20 hindsight, Bullitt and Freud conclude that Wilson had the power to have: settled World War I without entering the war, written an entirely different treaty of Versailles, and gotten the United States into the League of Nations. His failure to do so was the result of his neurotic character and passive-feminine orientation.
The primitive psychological formulation (which Freud reiterates until the reader becomes painfully aware of it) states that Wilson was the product of an unresolved Oedipal situation. Dominated by his father, he became weak and submissive to father figures, identified his father with God and himself with Jesus Christ, and experienced intense sibling rivalry with his brother who became Judas. Ipso facto, then, Wilson played out these roles with everyone he came into contact with and this is demonstrated by referral to actual events. The libido theory is treated as if it were a physical law. The final conclusion is: “He never solved the major dilemma of the oedipus complex, and in the end he was destroyed by the same ‘incomparable father” who created him.”
Nowhere in the book is there more than a very grudging