Patrick Weil | Elections 2024: The Madman in the White House:

In 2014, Patrick Weil happened upon a manuscript buried in the archives of Yale University. Written by a US diplomat named William C. Bullitt and Sigmund Freud 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 Bullitt and Freud’s project in his recent publication, The Madman in the White House (Harvard University Press, 2023). In this lecture, he shares insights from his research and analysis of the 1932 manuscript and reflect on their implications for how we assess the character of our leaders today. 3CT fellow Jennifer Pitts serves as respondent for the lecture. This is the first in a series of Theorizing the Present events on the 2024 US elections. Co-sponsored by the France Chicago Center and the Interdisciplinary Workshop on France and the Francophone World. –– Recorded October 10, 2024. All rights to the words and ideas expressed in this video are retained exclusively by their authors. If you would like to reuse a segment of this video, please contact the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory to request permission.