Woodrow Wilson

A Psychological Study

William Bullitt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351298988
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This volume originated when William C. Bullitt began working on a book of studies of the principle personalities surrounding the Treaty of Versailles. In discussing this project with Sigmund Freud, the idea arose of a collaborative work on Woodrow Wilson. They worked on the book for ten years, reading all of Wilson's published books and speeches as well as volumes written about Wilson. After perusing this material, Bullitt and Freud realized that they could not write an analysis of Wilson's character unless they deepened their understanding of his nature with private, unpublished information from his intimates. They then set out to collect diaries, letters, records, and memoranda from various associates of Wilson.Freud writes in his introduction that he did not begin this study with an objective view of Wilson, but rather held an unsympathetic view of him. But he goes on to say that while reading through materials about Wilson, his strong emotions underwent a thorough subjugation. He describes Wilson as a person for whom mere facts held no significance; he esteemed highly nothing but human motives and opinions. As a result, writes Freud, it was natural for him in his thinking to ignore the facts of the real outer world, even to deny they existed if they conflicted with his hopes and wishes. This habit of thought is visible in his contacts with others. Freud also notes that there was an intimate connection between Wilson's alienation from the world of reality and his religious convictions.The book opens with a thirty-page biography of Wilson written by Bullitt. The collaborative psychological study that makes up the bulk of the volume then follows. Woodrow Wilson provides readers with a more intimate knowledge of the man, which in turn leads to a more exact estimate of his achievements. This intriguing psychoanalytic study will be of continuing interest to historians, political scientists, psychologists, and sociologists.

A
Psychological Study
of
THOMAS WOODROW WILSON

by

Sigmund Freud and

William C. Bullitt

I

MANY BOOKS have been written about Thomas Woodrow Wilson, and many of his friends have attempted to explain him to themselves and to others. The explanations have one quality in common: they end with a note of uncertainty. Wilson remains, even to his biographers and intimates, a character of contradictions, an enigma. On June 10, 1919, in the final month of the Peace Conference, Colonel Edward M. House recorded in his diary: “I think I never knew a man whose general appearance changed so much from hour to hour. It is not the President’s face alone that changes. He is one of the most difficult and complex characters I have ever known. He is so contradictory that it is hard to pass judgment upon him.” To this conclusion, with greater or less emphasis, all Wilson’s intimates and biographers come at last.

Wilson was, indeed, complex; and it will not be easy to discover the clue to the unity underlying the apparent contradictions of his character. Moreover, we should not set out with false hopes. We shall never be able to achieve a full analysis of his character. About many parts of his life and nature we know nothing. The facts we know seem less important than those we do not know. All the facts we should like to know could be discovered only if he were alive and would submit to psychoanalysis. He is dead. No one will ever know those facts. We cannot, therefore, hope to comprehend the decisive events of his psychic life either in all their details or in all their connections. We cannot, consequently, call this work a psychoanalysis of Wilson. It is a psychological study based upon such material as is now available, nothing more.

On the other hand, we do not wish to underestimate the evidence we possess. We know much about many aspects of Wilson’s life and character. We must give up hope of full analysis; but we know enough about him to justify the hope that we may be able to trace the main path of his psychic development. To the facts we know about him as an individual we shall add the facts which psychoanalysis has found to be true with regard to all human beings. Wilson was, after all, a human being, subject to the same laws of psychic development as other men; and the universality of those laws has been proved by the psychoanalysis of innumerable individuals.

To say this is not to say that psychoanalysis has revealed the ultimate mysteries of human life. It has, so to speak, opened the door which leads to the inner life of man and has allowed us to recognize the existence of a few objects which lie close to the door, though the objects which lie deeper are still veiled in obscurity. It has let a little light into the darkness, so that we are now able to distinguish the outlines of certain objects in the murk. We can describe certain mechanisms that are used by the ultimate reality which we cannot describe. Our science is still very young, and further research will doubtless prove that the lines with which we now attempt to delineate those objects have not been altogether truly drawn. But our expectation that the details of present conceptions will later have to be modified should not prevent us from using the conceptions we now have. The work of Newton was not rendered useless because Einstein followed; and had it not been for Newton there would probably not have been an Einstein. We shall, therefore, as a matter of course, employ certain theorems which psychoanalysis has developed from the facts it has discovered, for which it now demands belief. It seems necessary to set forth as briefly as possible a few of these conceptions and suppositions before we attack the psychological problem presented by Wilson’s character.

We begin with the axiom that in the psychic life of man, from birth, a force is active which we call libido, and define as the energy of the Eros.

The libido must be stored somewhere. We conceive that it “charges” certain areas and parts of our psychic apparatus, as an electric current charges a storage battery or accumulator; that, like a charge of electricity, it is subject to quantitative alterations; that, dwelling without discharge, it shows tension in proportion to the quantity of the charge and seeks outlet; further, that it is continually fed and renewed by physical generators.

The libido first stores itself in love of self: Narcissism. This phase is clearly visible in an infant. His interest are confined to the acts and products of his own body. He finds all his courses of pleasure in himself. To be sure, even an unweaned child has a love-object; the breast of his mother. He can, however, do nothing but to introject this object into himself and treat it as a part of himself.

In contrast to Narcissism we place object-love. Occasionally, a condition similar to the Narcissism of the new-born child is preserved by an adult who then appears to us as a monstrous egoist, incapable of loving anyone or anything except himself; but normally in the course of life a part of the libido is directed toward objects outside the self. Another part continues to adhere to the self. Narcissism is the first dwelling of the libido and remains its most enduring home. In different individuals the proportion between narcissistic and object-love varies greatly; the chief charge of the libido may be stored in the self or in objects; but no man is utterly without love of self.

Our second theorem declares: all human beings are bisexual. Every individual, whether man or woman, is composed of elements of masculinity and femininity. Psychoanalysis has established this fact as firmly as chemistry has established the presence of oxygen, hydrogen, carbon and other elements in all organic bodies.

When the primary phase of pure Narcissism has been lived through and the love-objects have begun to play their role, the libido begins to charge three accumulators: Narcissism, masculinity and femininity. As expressions of femininity we consider all those desires which are characterized by passivity, above all the need to be loved, and in addition, the inclination to submit to others which reaches its apex in Masochism, the desire to be hurt by others. On the other hand, we call masculine all desires which display the character of activity, like the desire to love, and the wish to achieve power over other men, to control the outer world and alter it in accordance with one’s desires. Thus we associate masculinity with activity and femininity with passivity.

The primary love-objects the child finds are his mother and father or their substitutes. His earliest relationships to his parents are passive in nature: the child is nursed and caressed by them, guided by their orders and punished by them. The libido of the child first discharges itself through these passive relationships. Then one may observe a reaction on the part of the child. He wishes to give his parents tit for tat, to become active toward them, to caress them, command them and avenge himself upon them. Thereupon, in addition to Narcissism, four outlets stand open for his libido, through passivity to his father and mother and through activity toward them. Out of this situation grows the Oedipus complex.

In order to explain the Oedipus complex we must introduce the third axiom of psychoanalysis, an assumption from the theory of the instincts, which declares that in the psychic life of man two chief instincts are active: the Eros, that is to say love in the widest sense, whose energy we have called libido, and another instinct, which we have named after its final aim, the Death Instinct. The Death Instinct displays itself to us as an impulse to attack and destroy. It is the opponent of the Eros, which strives always to produce larger and larger unities held together by the libido. Both instincts are from the beginning present together in the psychic life and seldom or never appear in pure form but are, as a rule, welded together in varying proportions.

Thus, what appears to us as masculinity and femininity never consists of libido alone but always carries with it a certain additional element of desire to attack and destroy. We assume that this additional element is much greater in the case of masculinity than in the case of femininity; but it is not absent from the latter.

Let us stress once more the fact that every charge of libido brings with it a bit of aggression and return to the Oedipus complex. We shall, however, discuss only the Oedipus complex of the male child.

We have noted that the libido of the child charges five accumulators: Narcissism, passivity to the mother, passivity to the father, activity toward the mother and activity toward the father, and begins to discharge itself by way of these desires. A conflict between these different currents of the libido produces the Oedipus complex of the little boy. At first the child feels no conflict: he finds satisfaction in the discharge of all his desires and is not disturbed by their incompatibility. But gradually it becomes difficult for the little boy to reconcile his activity toward his father and mother with his passivity to them, either because the intensity of his desires has increased or because a need arises to unify or synthesize all these divergent currents of the libido.

It is especially difficult for the little boy to reconcile his activity toward his mother with his passivity to his father. When he wishes to express fully his activity toward his mother he finds his father in the way. He then wishes to sweep his father out of his way as a hindrance to possession of his mother; but on the other hand, the charge of libido stored in passivity to his father makes him desire to submit to his father, even to the point of wishing to become a woman, his own mother, whose position with respect to his father he desires to occupy. From this source arises later the mother identification which becomes a permanent ingredient in the boy’s unconscious.

The little boy’s wish to thrust aside his father becomes irreconcilable with his wish to be passive to his father. The desires of the child are in conflict. The discharge of the libido from all its accumulators except Narcissism thus becomes hindered and the child is in the conflict which we call the Oedipus complex.

The solution of the Oedipus complex is the most difficult prob- lem that faces a child of man in his psychic development. In the case of a little boy, fear turns the greater part of the libido away from the mother to the father, and his major problem becomes the irreconcilability of his desire to kill his father with his equally ardent desire to submit utterly to his father.

One method of escape from the major dilemma of the Oedipus complex is employed by all males: identification with the father. Equally unable to kill his father or to submit utterly to him, the litte boy finds an escape which approximates removal of his father and nevertheless avoids murder. He identifies himself with his father. Thereby he satisfies both his tender and hostile desires with respect to his father. He not only expresses his love and admiration for his father but also removes his father by incorporating his father in himself as if by an act of cannibalism. Thenceforth he is himself the great admired father.

This early step of father identification makes comprehensible the later ambition to outdo the father and become greater than the father which we so often observe in youth. The father with whom the little boy identifies himself is not the father as he actually is in life and will later be recognized to be by the son, but a father whose powers and virtues have undergone an extraordinary expansion, whose weaknesses and faults have been denied. He is the father as he appears to the little child. Later, measured by the side of this ideal figure, the real father must necessarily seem small; and when a youth wishes to become a greater man than his father, he merely turns back from the actual father as he is in life to the father figure of his childhood.

This almighty, omniscient, all-virtuous father of childhood, as a result of his incorporation in the child, becomes an internal psychic power which in psychoanalysis we call the Ego-Ideal or the Super-Ego. The Super-Ego makes itself known during the remainder of the child’s life through its commands and prohibitions. Its negative prohibiting function is well known to us all as conscience. Its positive commanding side is perhaps less easily perceptible, but certainly more important. It finds expression through all the conscious and unconscious aspirations of the individual. Thus out of the unsatisfied desire of the boy to kill his father arises father identification, the Ego-Ideal and the Super-Ego.

The establishment of the Super-Ego does not, to be sure, solve all the difficulties of the Oedipus complex; but it creates an accumulator for a certain portion of the current of libido which was originally aggressive activity toward the father. In exchange, however, it becomes the source of new difficulties with which the Ego thenceforth has to deal. For the Super-Ego throughout the remainder of life admonishes, censures, represses and strives to insulate and turn away from their goals all desires of the libido which do not satisfy its ideals. In many human beings this struggle in the Ego between the libido and the Super-Ego is not severe, either because the libido is feeble and allows itself to be guided easily by the Super-Ego or because the Super-Ego is so weak that it can only look on while the libido goes its own way; or because the ideals of the Super-Ego are not exalted above the limitations of human nature, so that it demands nothing more from the libido than the libido is ready to concede. The latter variety of Super-Ego is an agreeable one for the person who harbors it; but it has the disadvantage that it permits the development of a very ordinary human being. A Super-Ego which does not demand much from the libido does not get much; the man who expects little from himself gets little.

At the opposite extreme stands the Super-Ego whose ideals are so grandiose that it demands from the Ego the impossible. A Super-Ego of this sort produces a few great men, many psychotics and many neurotics. The manner in which such a Super-Ego develops is easy to understand. We have noted that every child has an exaggerated idea of the greatness and power of his father. In many cases this exaggeration is so excessive that the father with whom the little boy identifies himself, whose image becomes his Super-Ego, expands into the Almighty Father Himself: God. Such a Super-Ego continually demands the impossible from the Ego. No matter what the Ego may actually achieve in life, the Super-Ego is never satisfied with the achievement. It admonishes incessantly: You must make the impossible possible! You can accomplish the impossible! You are the Beloved Son of the Father! You are the Father Himself! You are God!

A Super-Ego of this sort is not a rarity. Psychoanalysis can testify that identification of the father with God is a normal if not a common occurrence in the psychic life. When the son identifies himself with his father and his father with God and erects that father as his Super-Ego, he feels that he has God within him, that he himself will become God. Everything that he does must be right because God Himself does it. The quantity of libido which charges this identification with God becomes so great in some human beings that they lose the ability to recognize the existence of facts in the world of reality which contradict it. They end in lunatic asylums. But the man whose Super-Ego is based upon this supposition, who preserves a full respect for facts and reality, may, if he possesses ability, accomplish great things in the world. His Super-Ego demands much and gets much.

To reconcile himself to the world of reality is naturally one of the chief tasks of every human being. This task is not an easy one for a child. Not one of the desires of his libido can find full satisfaction in the real world. Every human being who lives in the world has to achieve such a reconciliation. The person who entirely fails to accomplish this task falls into psychosis, insanity. The person who is able to achieve only a partial and therefore unstable settlement of the conflict becomes a neurotic. Only the man who achieves a complete reconciliation becomes a normal healthy human being. We must add, to be sure, that the reconciliation of the conflict is never so complete that it may not be broken down by the attack of sufficient external misfortunes. We are justified in saying that all men are more or less neurotic. Nevertheless in some men the settlement is based on such firm foundations that they can endure great misfortunes without falling into neurosis, while others need suffer only slight adversity to induce them to construct neurotic symptoms.

Every human Ego is the result of the effort to reconcile all these conflicts: the conflicts between the divergent desires of the libido, and the conflicts of the libido with the demands of the Super-Ego and with the facts of the real world of human life. The type of reconciliation finally established is determined by the relative strength of the inborn masculinity and femininity of the individual and the experiences to which he is subjected as a little child. The final product of all these attempts at reconciliation is the character.

To unify the desires of the libido with each other and the commands of the Super-Ego and the demands of the outer world is, as we have said, no easy task for the Ego: all the instincts must be satisfied somehow; the Super-Ego insists upon its commandments; and adaptation to reality cannot be escaped. To accomplish this task the Ego employs, when direct satisfaction of the libido is impossible, three mechanisms: Repression, Identification and Sublimation.

Repression is the method of denying the existence of the instinctive desire which demands satisfaction, treating it as if it did not exist, relegating it to the unconscious and forgetting it.

Identification seeks to satisfy the instinctive desire by transforming the Ego itself into the desired object, so that the self represents both the desiring subject and the desired object.

Sublimation is the method of giving the instinctive desire a partial satisfaction by substituting for its unattainable object a related object which is not disapproved by the Super-Ego or by the external world: thus the instinctive desire is transferred from its most satisfactory but inadmissible aim or object to one which is perhaps less satisfactory but more easily attainable.

Repression is the least effective of these methods of achieving the desired reconciliation of the conflict because it is impossible in the long run to disregard the instinctive desires. In the end the pressure of the libido becomes too great, the repression collapses and the libido flashes out. Moreover, the intensity of the repressed libido is greatly increased by the repression since it is not only insulated from all discharge but also withdrawn from the moderating influence of the reason which reckons with reality. The repression may achieve the success that the libido finally does not discharge itself by way of its original object, but is compelled to break open a new outlet and cast itself upon a different object.

For example, a boy who completely represses his hostility to his father does not thereby become free from his instinctive desire to kill his father. On the contrary, behind the dam of repression, his aggressive activity against his father increases until its pressure becomes too strong for the insulator. The repression collapses, his hostility to his father bursts forth and flings itself either against the father himself or against some substitute for him, someone who in some manner resembles him and may therefore be used as a father representative.

Hostility to the father is unavoidable for any boy who has the slightest claim to masculinity. And if a man in his childhood has completely repressed this instinctive impulse, he will invariably in later life fall into hostile relations with father representatives. He will display this hostility whether the father representatives deserve it or not. They draw his hostility upon themselves by the mere accident that in some way they remind him of his father. In such cases his hostility springs almost entirely from himself and has almost no external source. If it happens that in addition he has a real cause for hostility, then his emotional reaction becomes excessive and his hostility expands out of all proportion to the external cause. As a rule such a man will find it difficult to maintain friendly relationships with other men of equal position, power and ability, and it will be impossible for him to cooperate with persons who are superior to him in position, power and ability: such men he is compelled to hate.

We cannot leave the theme of repression without calling attention to the technique which the Ego employs to insure individual acts of repression. For this purpose th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Digest of Data on The Childhood and Youth of Thomas Woodrow Wilson
• A Psychological Study of Thomas Woodrow Wilson
• Index