In September 2001 my daughter was a graduate student at Harvard. On the 11thday of that month, she spent some time sitting on a bench on campus, holding hands with one of her professors, while the two of them wept. Like many of her professors, this man was a renowned scholar. But unlike most, he came from a tough neighborhood in the Bronx. When phone service was restored to the West Coast, my daughter called. She said, “Mom, I'm so glad I was with my professor, because the people here at Harvard, they don't get it. It's like it wasn't their country that was attacked.”

It wasn't. Decades ago, the self-amazed, academic staccato-talkers at places like Harvard constructed an edifice of convenient untruths about the United States. America was reframed as an intolerant, aggressive, and morally backward nation. This dogma enabled the elites to claim the advantages of being American while exempting themselves from any form of military service, or gratitude for the military, which provides their national security. Most of such types at Harvard consider themselves American, but special, enlightened ones; it was the greedy, intolerant, patriotic folks who were attacked on 9/11.

Harvard's currently most famous alumnus, Barack Obama, takes anti-American dogma one step further into an idée fixe. He suffers a delusion within the illusion of American perfidy, a fixed, fervent ideological system against an imaginary evil white patriarchy. And the face of his “singular fixation of the intellect” has been George W. Bush. On the level of the heart, Obama has no country. Not only does he not identify with the people who died on 9/11, but to a degree beyond most left-wing elites, he is sympathetic to the Islamists who killed them.

Imagine if during World War II American soldiers had fought and died in order to capture five ace Luftwaffe pilots. Then President Roosevelt ordered the pilots to be sent back to the Nazis so they could resume dropping bombs. That is exactly what Obama did against America in the Bergdahl “swap.” It was a treasonous act expressing the rage he carries, which he focuses against Bush's war on terrorism.

Charles Krauthammer explains Obama as the President who wants to end war. But the organizing principle of Obama's military policy is to end the Iraq war in defeat for America. Obama is driven by an obsessive resentment, conscious and unconscious, against a delusional evil white patriarchy, which causes him to help America's enemies. Above all, Obama was driven to lose the war in Iraq to claim victory over Bush, the ideal foil for his idée fixe.

The concept of the idée fixe was the forerunner of the condition called obsession. An idée fixe can form when the vulnerable ego of a child or adult is shocked and humiliated by mistreatment or abuse. The ego experiences rage and powerlessness, and is unable to make sense of and reintegrate beyond the abuse. Psychological energy can reorient around an idée fixe, in this case a transference of rage away from the actual abuser(s), onto a safer psychological object. Also, unlike obsession where there may be some insight and motivation to break free, the fixedly prejudiced mind does not question itself, but devotes energy and resources to the delusion. Relationships and responsibilities apart from the idée fixe are neglected in the self-deception that when the enemy is conquered, every problem will be solved. The pathological aspects of the President’s idée fixe involve anti-white racism and anti-father psychology, both typified by Bush.

The greatest threat to American-style socialism is a Godful father in the home. The last two Democratic Presidents had no such fathers. There is strong evidence that both Presidents Clinton and Obama suffered childhood abuse resulting from unstable, toxic parenting. These kinds of childhoods are being inflicted on more and more American children as socialist progressivism moves authority and responsibility from parents, especially fathers, to government. Of all the sequelae of child abuse, the most intense is the rage formed in the mind of a boy who has been sexually mistreated. Clinton took out his rage against women. But as reckless and cruel as his behavior was, it did not influence his foreign or domestic policy. Obama's rage is cathected against an irrational stereotype of white patriarchy, personified by Bush. Obama's idée fixe strongly influences his policies, especially his role as Commander in Chief.

Wealth corrupts and corruption spawns self-justifying ideology. The princes of the world held aloft by divine rights were not known for their moral rectitude or selfless service. The American baby boom generation has been decried as the me generation, the generation of narcissists. That is primarily because scientific and technological advances, actualized by free enterprise and victory in war, enabled the first generation in human history to emulate princes: overthrow their fathers, place themselves above patriotism and military service, pursue their own passions, and find their own psyches to be very important. Like many analysands who enter analysis to explore grievances against their parents, the post-war intellectual elites developed a severe case of false memory syndrome regarding American history, which fueled progressive ideology.

Obama’s childhood set the stage for transference of rage against the parents and parent figures who abandoned, rejected and abused him to anti-white, anti-father ideology. Obama’s poppa, Barack Sr., was a rolling stone. Wherever he laid his hat he left an abandoned son. And when he died all he left them was drunken, racist, Communism.

Obama was literally conceived in racist ideology. His unwed, teenage mother represented the avant-garde of the racism that says it is liberation for white girls to have sex with older black men. According to Dinesh D’Souza, Obama’s “swinger” mother was so strongly anti-American and sympathetic to communism, she sent her son back to Hawaii rather than have him influenced by his step-father who worked for American oil interests.

Then there is the creepy commie, Frank Marshall Davis, who some believe is the President’s actual father. Regarding the psychogenesis of rage, Davis’s pornography work, sex obsession, and barely fictionalized erotic writings about underagers like Obama’s mother were more harmful to the boy than Davis’s activist communism.

The worst impediments to the realization of legal rights in American history have been variations of racism. In the 1800s, “one drop” of Negro blood tainted a person. Today at Harvard, one drop of non-white blood is an advantage. Elizabeth Warren gained special recognition there based on her claim of Native American ancestry. This wave of anti-white favoritism reached its zenith at America’s most influential university -- and set Obama on course to the presidency.

The anti-father bias of progressivism is a subtler element of Obama’s idée fixe. It is a psychopathologic development of late 20^th-century progressivism. For example, if John Kennedy, Jr. had lived to seek political office, his paternal background would have been idealized and his family’s wealth would never have been criticized. George W. Bush, on the other hand, was the idiot child with a legacy education bought by wealthy carpetbaggers. That’s how the left wing rolls.

A person suffering an idée fixe such as Obama’s tends to associate with surrogate rage enactors. Obama’s years of dependence on Bill Ayers and his family was at its deepest level a symbiosis of exhilarating, smug anti-American rage. Of the millions of young people protesting the war in Vietnam, Bill Ayers was the leader of a handful of extreme, conscienceless murderers. That is why Obama dug him. Ayers concocted the myth of Obama by ghostwriting Dreams from My Father. Ayers admits he spun the tales about a plucky, brilliant lad who overcomes racism to work for unity and freedom for all.

There is a direct line between Ayers and the ISIS fighters who won Obama’s victory over George W. Bush. Obama feels safe, energized, and vindicated by radically violent men, as he plays Kumbaya golfer. President Obama declared victory in Iraq because he has indeed won his war against George W. Bush. After the declaration he made a triumphal march to Martha’s Vineyard in his ideological home state of Massachusetts. Genocidal campaigns, rapes, and children’s heads on stakes will not dampen his satisfaction in winning the only military victory he has really sought.

I am grateful for the education my daughter received at Harvard. I pray that the most brilliant people wake up from their illusions and support the military to which they owe their freedom. I pray they cleanse their hearts of unjust blame and that they imagine what will happen to the world if the light of American courage goes dark.

Deborah C. Tyler, PhD.

Drawing by Otto Veblin