Woodrow Wilson's Political Personality: A Reappraisal

Historians, biographers, and political scientists, as well as psychiatrists and psychologists, have long been intrigued by Woodrow Wilson's personality and its relationship to the events of his academic, political, and diplomatic careers. Although interpretations have varied, there is universal agreement that Wilson's personality was of major importance in both his successes and failures. Along with the conventional descriptions of Woodrow Wilson's character by his major biographers, Ray Stannard Baker and Arthur S. Link, there have been two book-length psychoanalytic studies. The first, Thomas Woodrow Wilson, by Sigmund Freud and William C. Bullitt, was written during the 1930s but not published until 1967.1 This study, a biased application of a simplistic and distorted version of psychoanalytic theory, is not regarded either by historians or psychoanalysts as a scholarly contribution. In one review,2 Link demonstrated that the evidence on which the psychological interpretations are based is