Rare English-language ALS signed “Freud,” one page both sides, 5.25 x 8.25, personal letterhead, January 15, 1922. Handwritten letter to American journalist William Bayard Hale, in full: “I greatly enjoyed your book, ‘The Story of a Style.’ I had felt prejudiced against it by your publisher advertising it as a ‘psychoanalytic study’ of Woodrow Wilson, which designation you yourself disclaim. But there is the true spirit of psychoanalysis in it. You have indeed opened up a new field of analytic research and your first results however incomplete may be correct as far as I can judge them. That kind of a higher and more scientific ‘graphologie’ is sure to find a broad application in literary criticism. By the article in the Rundschau I learned what kind of a man you are and what your former relations with Mr. Wilson had been. I fully sympathize with you but I think you should not describe your work as a cool scientific study of the man. There is a deep passion behind your investigation, it often betrays itself in your lines and it were a miracle if it did not so. You need not be ashamed of it, yet I cannot overcome my objection that what you have done is a bit of vivisection and that psychoanalysis should not be [used] practiced on a living individual. I therefore submit to you my wish that you should not publish my letter as a whole but should take out of it such passages as you deem convenient; you are invited to correct my grammatical errors and faulty impressions. And now let me add in a purely confidential way: I detest the man who is the object of your study. As far as a single individual can be responsible for the misery of this part of the world he surely is. With the expression of my sincere respect.” In fine condition.
Freud was deeply affected by World War I in which his sons fought for Austria and dissolved the Austro-Hungarian Empire; he came to hold a deep antipathy, as stated in our letter, towards President Woodrow Wilson. ‘The harsh realities of the negotiations at Versailles had converted Freud's limited and fleeting hopes for Wilson into furious dissatisfaction. Freud was not disposed to forgive the American messiah for letting him down…In 1921, he made some of his anger public, disparaging 'the American president's Fourteen Points' as 'fantastic promises' that had found too much credence.’ (Freud: A Life for Our Time, Peter Gay).
Freud famously collaborated with American diplomat (and fellow Wilson hater) William Christian Bullitt on a psychoanalytical study of Wilson that was first published in Europe in the 1930s but did not appear in the U. S. until 1967. Freud and Bullitt attributed Wilson's diplomacy to religious fanaticism – a judgment that no historian has endorsed. Their book was greeted with uniformly hostile reviews, with British scholar A. J. P. Taylor asking, ‘How did anyone ever manage to take Freud seriously?’
The recipient, William Bayard Hale, was a Boston minister turned journalist who was a writer and editor, known for his keen political analysis on the pages of such high-profile publications as Cosmopolitan Magazine, the New York Times, and the Philadelphia Public Ledger. A friend and advisor to New Jersey Governor Woodrow Wilson, he penned his 1911 biography Woodrow Wilson: The Story of His Life. After Wilson's 1912 presidential victory, he sent Hale on a diplomatic mission to Mexico that culminated in America's interference in the Mexican Civil War several years later. Shortly thereafter, Hale fell out with Wilson and used his book, The Story of a Style, to harshly attack Wilson's character.
Provenance: Ex Forbes Collection; Christie’s, New York, November 15, 2005, Lot 173.
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