Be careful for what you wish. That’s our advice for the leftists at Princeton who want to open up the case of the university’s former president, Woodrow Wilson, who went on to become 28th president of America and took us into World War I. Students are on a tear over Wilson’s Jim-Crow-grade racism. Good for them. They seek the removal from campus of any vestiges of the man who led their college for years and eventually became an apostle of world government.

The exercise, though, may give both students and faculty more than they bargained for. Like, say, some insights into the holier-than-thou-ism of the modern Democratic Party that has given us Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama. To do this right, after all, Princeton will have to launch an investigation into what made the preacher’s-son-turned-president tick. It will need to look not only at his record as head of the school, as governor, and president. But also at his psychiatry.

So here’s a tip. It turns out that an entire book on Wilson was written by none other than Sigmund Freud. The father of psychoanalysis wrote it in the 1930s with America’s former ambassador to the Soviet Union, William C. Bullitt. The authors had met in Vienna, when the former ambassador, himself a bundle of nerves, went to see Freud. Bullitt disclosed that he was writing a book on the framers of the Versailles treaty, and Freud asked to collaborate on Wilson.

They produced a book — finally published by Houghton Mifflin in 1967, nearly 30 years after Freud died — called “Thomas Woodrow Wilson, A Psychological Study.” What a can of worms. The tome was so weird that it horrified even Harvard’s Erik Erikson. “Disastrously bad” is what Erikson called the work in a long account that ran in in the New York Review of Books under the headline “The Strange Case of Freud, Bullitt and Woodrow Wilson.”

Strange is putting it mildly. Erikson’s review captures some of the choicest passages of psychiatric blather that passed from the pen of Freud and his co-author (Erikson tends to blame the book on Bullitt). They referred to the future president as “little Tommy.” He was raised in the South during and after the Civil War by a father who adored him and a mother who was an “under-vitalized woman.” It turns out the man who took us into World War I “never had a fist-fight in his life.”

Wilson’s “nervous breakdowns” — as a lad and an adult — are treated by Freud and Bullitt as, in Erikson’s phrase, “demeaning weakness.” Freud and Bullitt rattle on about “the libido of the child” and the “ego of a little boy who has no sister.” He ends up with a complex: “The God whom Thomas Woodrow Wilson worshipped to the end of his days,” Freud and Bullitt reckon, was his own father, Reverend Joseph Ruggles Wilson. “If his father was God,” they write, “he himself was God’s Only Beloved Son, Jesus Christ.”

In his childhood Wilson became infatuated with William Gladstone, four times prime minister of England. Freud and Bullitt reckon that for Wilson the British liberal became “the incomparable father of his early childhood.” So, Freud and Bullitt figure, “adolescent Tommy” then “destroyed Mr. Gladstone by the cannibalistic method of identification and announced: ‘That is Gladstone, the greatest statesman that ever lived. I intend to be a statesman, too.’”

Maybe — after the purge of Wilson from the campus — Princeton will try to get the New York Times to retract its editorials endorsing Wilson for president. Like the Democratic Party, the Times ignored Wilson’s racism. It picked him in 1912 over the Republican, President Taft, and the Bull Moose, New York’s Theodore Roosevelt. Wilson then gave us a Democratic Party that never got over its moral superiority to the rest of America. Freud died before he could get into the libido of Bill Clinton, the complexes of Hillary Clinton, and the dreams that Barack Obama had of his father.