Beschreibung:

WILSON, Woodrow]. FREUD, Sigmund (1856-1939). Autograph letter signed ("Freud") to William Bayard Hale (1869 - 1924), Vienna, 15 January 1922. 2 pages, 8vo, personal stationery, minor stains. FREUD EXPLAINS WHY HE "DETESTS" WOODROW WILSON: "...AS FAR AS A SINGLE INDIVIDUAL CAN BE RESPONSIBLE FOR THE MISERY OF THIS PART OF THE WORLD HE SURELY IS..." Freud answers Hale's request for an endorsement of his "psychoanalytical" study of the former President (and his former friend): Woodrow Wilson: The Story of a Style (1920): "I greatly enjoyed your book..." Freud tells him. "I had felt prejudiced against it by your publisher advertising it as a 'psychoanalytic study' of Woodrow Wilson, which you yourself disclaim. But there is the true spirit of psychoanalysis in it. You have indeed opened up a new field of analytic research, and your first results, however incomplete, may be correct as far as I can judge them. That kind of a higher and more scientific 'Graphologie' is sure to find a broad application in literary criticism. By the article in the [ Deutsche ] Rundschau I learned what kind of a man you are and what your former relations with Woodrow Wilson had been. I fully sympathize with you, but I think you should not describe your work as a cool scientific study of the man. There is deep passion behind your investigation, it often betrays itself in your lines and it were a miracle if it did not [do] so. You need not be ashamed of it, yet I cannot overcome my objection that what you have done is a bit of vivisection and that psychoanalysis should not be practiced on a living individual." Surely Freud here meant a "living historical figure"? "I therefore submit to you," he continues, "my wish that you should not publish my letter as a whole but should take out of it such passages as you deem convenient. You are invited to correct my grammatical errors and faulty expressions. And now let me add in a purely confidential way: I detest the man who is the object of your study. As far as a single individual can be responsible for the misery of this part of the world he surely is." A one-time friend of Wilson who served as his diplomatic emissary to Mexico, Hale and the President had a bitter falling out and he used his book to harshly attack Wilson's character. Freud famously colaborated with American diplomat (and fellow Wilson hater) William Christian Bullitt on a psychoanalytical study of Wilson that was first published in Europe in the 1930s, but did not appear in the U. S. until 1967. Freud and Bullitt attributed Wilson's diplomacy to religious fanaticism -- a judgment which no historian has endorsed. Their book was greeted with uniformly hostile reviews, with British scholar A. J. P. Taylor asking, "How did anyone ever manage to take Freud seriously?"