Sigmund Freud Wouldn’t Vote for Rick Perry

A psychological study of Woodrow Wilson published in 1966 speaks volumes about today’s political climate.

Despite our nation’s stringent church and state divide, politicians regularly and willingly inject religious motifs or their own religion into their own rhetoric. The public demands it: a Public Religion Research Institute and Religion News Service survey from last July showed that 56% of the nation wants a religious president, even if that religion differs from the one they practice.

Some lawmakers satisfy these holy urges by going so far as to say that God chose them to run, just as White House contenders Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann did earlier this year.

“I’m getting more and more comfortable every day that this is what I’ve been called to do,” said Perry prior to announcing his presidential campaign. Bachmann offered a similar sound bite, saying, “I will not seek a higher office if God is not calling me to do it.”

Pioneering psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud would have a lot to say about such proclamations, mostly negative.

In the late 1920s, former U.S. diplomat William C. Bullitt visited an ailing Freud in Berlin, and the two men decided, through a series of conversations, to collaborate on a psychological study of Woodrow Wilson.

That tome, completed around 1933, nine years after Wilson’s death, was not published until 1966, after Wilson’s second wife had died. Freud also was dead. Forty-five years have passed since the book, “Thomas Woodrow Wilson: A Psychological Study,” finally saw the light of day, but Freud and Bullitt’s commentary still speaks volumes about Wilson — and contemporary politics.

Best known for progressive policies like the Anti-Trust Act, fighting child labor, and supporting women’s right to vote and leading our nation through the Great War, Wilson was an almost fanatically religious man, due in part to the fact that his father, a Presbyterian minister and an equally pious man, Francis J. Brooke, the latter of whom helped him join the First Presbyterian Church of Columbia. That was the final move in Wilson’s complete conversion.

“The effect of this religious experience was profound and lasting,” write Freud and Bullitt. “From that moment to the end of his life he felt himself in direct communication with God. He felt that God had chosen him for a great work, that he was ‘guided by an intelligent power outside himself.’”

Ever the psychoanalyst, Freud traces this spirituality back to Wilson’s love for his father. “The God whom Thomas Woodrow Wilson worshiped the end of his days was the Reverend Joseph Ruggles Wilson, the ‘incomparable father’ of his childhood… If his father was God, he himself was God’s only beloved son, Jesus Christ.”

They elaborate:

In his unconscious he himself is God. Whatever he does is right because God does it. Tommy Wilson was able to justify to himself many curious actions of his own because of this unconscious conviction. Whatever he did must be right because God did it. He could on occasion admit that he had been mistaken. He could never admit that he had done wrong.

Though the book follows a scientific, analytical trajectory, Freud found it impossible to resist including his personal thoughts on Wilson, whom he loathed for his World War I policies. But it was more than just politics that turned off Freud. It was Wilson’s religious convictions.

From his introduction:

Freud knew then what so many people today fail to understand: those who profess a directive from God think themselves unaccountable to the people. Their actions often have (sometimes) unintentionally negative consequences. Wilson may have enacted progressive change for workers, but he also fueled anti-German sentiment during into World War I.

No politicians are perfect, of course, but Freud hits the nail on the head when he said Wilson’s conflation of his own decisions with God’s represented an “alienation from the world of reality.”

This leaves one question: which is more worrisome, a politician who truly believes they speak for God or one who simply claims so to win votes?