Berkeley Legal History Workshop Presents Patrick Weil

Patrick Weil is an emeritus research professor of history at the University of Paris 1, Pantheon-Sorbonne. From 2008 to 2023, he has been a visiting professor of law at Yale Law School.

Professor Weil’s work focuses on comparative immigration, citizenship, and church-state law and policy. His most recent books in English are The Madman in the White House. Sigmund Freud, Ambassador Bullitt and the Lost Psychobiography of Woodrow Wilson (Harvard University Press, 2023) and The Sovereign Citizen, Denaturalization and the Origins of the American Republic, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013.

Patrick Weil is also, since 2006, the founder and the chairman of the international NGO Libraries Without Borders (Bibliothèques Sans Frontières).

The Madman in the White House.
Sigmund Freud, Ambassador Bullitt and the lost Psychobiography of Woodrow Wilson

Abstract

In 2014, Patrick Weil happened upon a manuscript buried in the archives of Yale University. Written by Sigmund Freud together with a US diplomat named William C. Bullitt between 1930 and 1932, the text presents an extraordinary psychobiography of President Woodrow Wilson, whose mental capacity Bullitt had come to question in light of Wilson’s disastrous handling of the Treaty of Versailles. It was not until 1966 that Bullitt and Freud’s book was published as a heavily redacted and ultimately much-criticized edition that Weil found to differ from the original manuscript in over three hundred instances.

Weil presents a major reassessment of Freud and Bullitt’s project in his recent publication, The Madman in the White House (Harvard University Press, 2023). In this conversation, he will share insights from his research and analysis of the 1932 original manuscript and reflect on their implications for how we assess the character of our leaders today.

Please email Elena Gonzalez at egonzalez@law.berkeley.edu for a copy of the paper.

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