Practicing History_ Selected Essays - Barbara W. Tuchman [83]
In the 1920s when Bullitt’s second wife was a patient of Freud’s, the doctor helped Bullitt through a difficult period, and the two became friends. Their joint study of Wilson was begun in 1930 when, on learning from Bullitt that he was planning a book on the Treaty of Versailles and its authors, Freud eagerly offered to collaborate on the chapter on Wilson. The project soon grew into an analysis of Wilson alone. No more tempting subject for the exercise of the Freudian method could have offered itself. Wilson had combined world power with extraordinary contradictions of character which to Freud bespoke some torturing inner conflict. What was the nature of the conflict, and was it in fact the source of Wilson’s power as well as of his failure? The challenge of the question was obviously irresistible. Although, in the usual procedure, psychoanalysis takes two, the couch in this case would not be quite as silent as in the case of Moses, on whom Freud also tried analysis without the patient. Wilson had been dead only six years, not three thousand, and had left a mass of contemporary evidence.
Although work on the manuscript was completed in 1932, certain unspecified differences between the authors kept it from publication at that time. It was not until 1938, after Freud’s safe removal from Vienna to London, in which Bullitt, by then Ambassador to France, was directly instrumental, that agreement between them was reached. A contract authorizing publication by Bullitt was then signed, whether under a sense of obligation to Bullitt felt by Freud, who was then in his last illness and was to die in the following year, is impossible to say. Publication was mysteriously delayed for nearly thirty years, according to Bullitt as a matter of courtesy until after the death of Mrs. Wilson. The explanation seems inadequate since Mrs. Wilson died in 1961 (Bullitt survives), and in any case the authors originally intended to publish in 1932. Undeniably, certain questions are left unanswered, but not such, it seems to this reviewer, as to justify the current anguish of the psychoanalytic fraternity, who have greeted this posthumous work of the Master as if it were something between a forged First Folio and the Protocols of Zion. The sinister doubts they cast upon the authenticity of Freud’s share in the book seem groundless. The writing may or may not be largely Bullitt’s, but even if Freud only talked his share, characteristic ideas and prejudices affirm his presence. Moreover, his estate is sharing in the royalties.
The authors’ basic premise is that the Treaty of Versailles was the Great Betrayal, from which the world has suffered ever since; that as such it was the result of Wilson’s failure to make the Allies live up to the promise of the Fourteen Points and other Wilsonian principles; that he had the power to do so but exhibited a moral collapse and “mental degeneracy” at Paris which were the outcome of his inner psychological conflicts; ergo, that all of us thereafter have suffered from Wilson’s neuroses.
Despite a gaping hole in this argument, which I shall come to later, it has the simple appeal of all personal devil explanations of history. Blaming Versailles on Wilson’s personal faults is the easy way out, which J. M. Keynes, among others, followed in his Economic Consequences of the Peace. It has taken enough hold to justify a deeper look at the President whose Secretary of War,