The Sterling Memorial Library presents
Patrick Weil, Oscar M. Ruebhausen Distinguished Fellow, Yale Law School, research professor, National Center for Scientific Research in France, the founder and president of Libraries Without Borders, and he is the author of The Sovereign Citizen and How to Be French:
“The Madman in the White House.”
Author and scholar Patrick Weil will speak about his new book The Madman in the White House: Sigmund Freud, Ambassador Bullitt, and the Lost Psychobiography of Woodrow Wilson. It draws on material forgotten for nearly a century, discovered in the William C. Bullitt Papers in Yale’s archives. Weil tells the story of Bullitt’s collaboration with Sigmund Freud to write a psychological analysis of President Woodrow Wilson, whose destructive handling of the 1919 Treaty of Versailles prompted Bullitt to question Wilson’s state of mind. Drafted in 1932, the book was not published until 1966 in a heavily redacted edition that was panned by critics and discredited by Freud’s descendants. Working with the original 1932 manuscript, Weil examines the significance of Bullitt and Freud’s findings and offers a major reassessment of the notorious psychobiography.