Abraham Lincoln's excruciating, yet highly productive, midlife crisis; his woeful marriage to a dishonest woman who often embarrassed and sometimes physically abused him; his intense estrangement from a shiftless father; his streak of cruelty; his explosive temper; and his aversion to women are among the topics covered by Michael Burlingame in The Inner World of Abraham Lincoln.

Based primarily on long-neglected manuscript and newspaper sources - especially on reminiscences of people who knew Lincoln - this psychobiography casts new light on the emotional origins of Lincoln's deep hatred of slavery, on his transformation from a party hack to a statesman, on his relations with his family, on the causes of his depressions, and on the roots of his ambition. Burlingame uses a blend of Freudian and Jungian theory to interpret the psyche of the sixteenth president.