The Curious Case of Tommy (Woodrow) Wilson

This essay review explores the representation of the twenty-eighth president of the United States, Woodrow Wilson, in a curious project involving Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud and US diplomat William C. Bullitt that began soon after Wilson’s death in 1924. The article focuses on political scientist Patrick Weil’s investigative account of this collaborative project in his 2023 book The Madman in the White House and interrogates the ways in which Freud and Bullitt’s psychoanalytic approach to Wilson unearths deep tensions between public and private lives. These tensions reveal themselves both in the subject of their psychobiography—Woodrow Wilson the statesman contrasts with the more neurotic private persona Tommy Wilson—and in the motivations and misgivings expressed by Bullitt and Freud in their unique yet controversial collaboration.

Weil’s initial and closing focus is a collaborative account of Wilson drafted by Sigmund Freud and the US diplomat William C. Bullitt in the late 1920s and early 1930s during a phase when Bullitt was being analyzed by Freud in Paris