Practicing History_ Selected Essays - Barbara W. Tuchman [84]
The central neurosis, unearthed by the authors, which established its deep unconscious grip on the whole course of Wilson’s life and caused him, like Whittier’s Daniel Webster, to be “fiend-goaded down the endless dark,” was his fixation on his father. The relationship was, in fact, sufficiently remarkable to have attracted notice by others, notably Alexander and Juliet George in their study Woodrow Wilson and Colonel House, published in 1956. Recognizing in Wilson “some consuming inner difficulty for which he paid a terrible price,” the Georges used the father fixation as an informing symptom. Freud and Bullitt break it down into its Freudian components and show how these determined Wilson’s development and explain his frequent episodes of self-defeating behavior, which have always seemed so incomprehensible. They draw on the known facts of Wilson’s passionate adulation of and unbroken subservience to his father, his chronic headaches, indigestion, “breakdowns,” and other psychosomatic symptoms, his exaggerated friendships, hates, and quarrels, and other evidence.
Briefly, the analysis discovers a man in whom manifest submissiveness toward his father warred with unconscious hostility, which had to find release in acted-out hostility toward substitute father figures such as Dean West at Princeton and Senator Lodge, while the submissiveness had to be compensated by a torturing super-ego whose excessive demands “required of him such God-like achievements that no actual accomplishment could satisfy it.” On the jangling Freudian battlefield of the id, the conflict rages in many forms: There are the complicated shapes of narcissism—identification with the father, a Presbyterian minister, becoming identification with God, and, conversely, as little “Tommy” Wilson, with Jesus; there are over-devoted friendships with small, slight “son” figures—Hibben, Tumulty, House—always ending in a sense of betrayal; there is identification with the mother, prompting or requiring “feminine” concessions and submissions to father figures in the case of Lloyd George and Clemenceau; there are the compulsions to repeat, and, over all, the unrelenting super-ego.
Born of his deep inferiority as a small child vis-à-vis his father, which itself was part cause and part effect of the startling and almost unbelievable circumstance that Wilson did not learn the alphabet until the age of nine or read easily until eleven, his tyrannical superego could never be satisfied with any success. No rung up the ladder was high enough, not even Presidency of the United States; he had to become Savior of the World. The League of Nations was to be the Grail, proof of his title as Savior. The treaty’s inequities did not mater as long as it embodied the League, for the existence of the League would solve all problems. The League was “the rationalization which made it possible for him to believe he had indeed saved the world.” Wilson had to gain the League to save his soul, yet in the fight with Lodge he himself set up the conditions which made the gain impossible. In Freudian terms this becomes the death wish, which to this reviewer seems supererogatory, for the battle with his father in the shape of Lodge, plus the demands of his super-ego and the terrible truth in his heart that the treaty, even including the League, was not the peace he had promised the world, was enough to destroy any man. On October 2, 1919, came the paralytic stroke by thrombosis in the brain, even as thirteen years earlier, in the midst of his frenzied struggle with West at Princeton, his arteries reacted with the bursting of a blood vessel in the eye.
Thus foreshortened, the analysis is less persuasive than in the book, where all the details, examples, and corroborative evidence from episode to episode build up an inherent logic which has the same quality as certain dream interpretations: When they are right they fit, and one knows it