According to George Walden, the United States is a country with a psychosis, which the dictionary defines as a serious mental disorder characterised by, for example, delusions and a lack of insight into his condition on the part of the patient. No wonder that even sympathetic foreigners, says Walden, understand less than ever what makes America tick. This book is his attempt to enlighten them.

‘How can America’s intellectual and technological sophistication be reconciled with primitive attitudes on gun law and capital punishment?’ asks Walden. ‘How can its creed of self-seeking be combined with its religiosity? And how can its culture be at once infantile and highly mature?’ Why, in particular, is American society ‘manically sexualised’? Easy, he says: it is all the fault of the Puritans. Putting America on the couch, he examines its contradictions, hypocrisies and neuroses, in everything from sex and crime to business and foreign policy. All, he declares, can be explained by the enduring influence of this bunch of early English immigrants.

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