In the twelve years that I have worked on a biography of Washington, I have made various unexpected discoveries. Surely the most surprising was that George Washington is alive. Or, to put it more accurately, millions of George Washingtons are alive. Washingtons have been born and have died for some two centuries.

Almost every historical figure is regarded as a dead exemplar of a vanished epoch. But Washington exists within the minds of most Americans as an active force. He is a multitude of living ghosts, each shaped less by eighteenth-century reality than by the structure of the individual brain in which he dwells. An inhabitant of intimate spaces, Washington is for private reasons sought out or avoided, loved or admired, hated or despised. In my wanderings of a dozen years, I have come across almost no Americans who proved, when the subject was really broached, emotionally indifferent to George Washington.

The roles played by the mythological George Washingtons fall into two major categories: one Freudian, the other a procession of mirrors reflecting people’s attitudes toward the situation of the United States at their time.

In an essay that had no specific reference to Washington, Freud described how “infantile fantasies” concerning people’s own fathers can shape their conceptions of historical figures. “They obliterate,” Freud wrote, “the individual features of their subject’s physiognomy, they smooth over the traces of his life’s struggles with internal and external resistances, and they tolerate in him no vestiges of human weakness or imperfection. Thus, they present us with what is in fact a cold, strange, ideal figure instead of a human being to whom we might feel ourselves distantly related.”

Here is, of course, an exact description of the marble image of Washington which so many Americans harbor—and resent. I have been amazed by the infantile glee with which people I have met made fun of my writing a biography of Washington. Was I recording the clacking of wooden false teeth? Had I ever tried to envision how Washington would have looked in long winter underwear? These mockers often dance up and down with self-satisfaction, like a small child who has dared express an impious thought about his father.

Down the years, Washington’s second mythological role has been as a national symbol, an alternate to the American flag. In periods when Americans were happy with their society,