BARACK OBAMA AND THE ROAD TO BONDAGE

A psychological profile of America’s first black president, with a review of the influences shaping his persona and policies.

Psychiatrist and psychoanalyst R.M. Catton (Midnight Clear: An American Christmas Carol, 2006, etc.) and his wife S.W. Catton team up in this penetrating case study of Barack Obama and his political views. Organized as a series of essays published online from 2009 to 2012, their book paints a disturbing picture of a man at odds with himself and the nation he was elected to lead—a president with the determination of a messianic prophet who wishes to punish America for its past sins by redistributing wealth "wrongfully gained" by white Americans, by ignoring the constraints of a Constitution adopted by white Founding Fathers, and by weakening the nation’s influence abroad. The authors note that, despite being born to a white mother and being raised by his white maternal grandparents, Obama presents himself as a black man, though he “dislikes, perhaps even hates, being Black.” His self-loathing, the authors say, is due to a tendency “to regard persons of Black and White mix as having a flawed pedigree….Blacks are generally not widely welcomed anywhere except in their own native homeland.” Additionally, Obama may despise his black heritage because, the Cattons argue, he’s ashamed to acknowledge that the black race is the least successful in First World nations, it has the lowest IQ of all the races, and it lacks “Culture Capital”—that reservoir of literary, artistic and scientific accomplishment within a civilized society. The Cattons maintain that Obama transferred his self-loathing onto America for the nation’s past crimes against blacks; his political agenda, they say, is meant to equal the score and save the nation from itself. Although the authors’ writing style is academic and often eloquent, the text would benefit from footnotes and a bibliography. Still, they adeptly explain their points while bringing a clinical viewpoint to their case. Other books have characterized Obama as a socialist determined to destroy the American dream, but few have so intriguingly used clinical psychoanalysis to explain his persona and his policies, controversial as they may be.

A complex, disturbing psychoanalysis of Obama and his political agenda, not easily dismissed.