AS WE PROCEED with our divorce from Europe – on the usual ground of irreconcilable differences, including but not limited to disagreements about the value of warfare, environmental conscientiousness, and religion – one's eyes remain curiously dry. Our country sprang from the old continent's Renaissance, Reformation, and Enlightenment, but despite the English affectations of the American upper classes, America was never English or European. We have always been, instead – and we remain – a society of the sort that until quite recently hadn't existed in Europe for a millennium: one of immigrants, of scrabblers, opportunists, and risk-takers whose instincts for aggression and survival are highly, and perhaps now over-, developed. We were long fated to go our separate ways, though for sentimental and to some degree practical reasons, we hesitated to think so. But the rupture is plain and growing, and a globe-trotting Condi isn't going to mend it. The Europeans are green, loosely federal, diplomacy-minded, and respectful of the social contract – civilized, in a word – while we are a fully-loaded 18-wheeler with no brakes hurtling down an icy mountain highway in the wrong lane.

"America is an unusual nation," Peter Whybrow writes with decorous restraint at the outset of his new book, American Mania: When More Is Not Enough (Norton, $24.95). The country "is in many ways a genetic experiment as much as it is a social one" in which "the temperament of the migrant has played a unique role." If that sounds on the diagnostic side, it's because Whybrow is an academic psychiatrist – a late-period, Civilization and Its Discontents Freud for our times who has laid his immense patient on the couch in hopes of figuring out what has gone wrong. He is also, though he lives in Los Angeles and New Hampshire, British by birth, and his sympathetic otherness surely is part of why he is able to see us as much of the rest of the world sees us, outside the star-spangled glare of self-congratulating patriotism that has been so mercilessly on display since Sept. 11, 2001.

Whybrow sees a lot of dysfunction, much of it having to do with overindulged material appetites, for food, for stuff, for money to buy more food and stuff or just to have as proof of one's human worth or to bully those who have less. "The ancient reward-seeking behaviors of our species," he writes, "particularly represented in the restless temperament of the migrant, have been magnified to reveal a fundamental paradox of human freedom: that the healthy instincts for self-preservation – self-interest, curiosity, and ambition – when consistently and excessively rewarded by affluent circumstance and a plethora of choice, will run away to greed" and, en masse, create "an addictive culture of covetous desire – a commercial juggernaut over which social sensibilities exert little constraint."

A little red flag pops up from practically every word of that long sentence, but it is the feebleness of American social life that so morbidly captures the attention of those who did not grow up in this country in its "Super-size it!" – and perhaps terminal – phase of imperial and miserable gluttony. As a German friend pointed out to me recently, to glide along the city streets in a car is to be in isolation, with the rest of the world viewed through panes of glass as if on a movie screen. Even in San Francisco, an old city with as much compaction and human intimacy as you are going to find in any American metropolis, the roads are filled with rushing SUVs of a bulging gigantism that reminds you of steroid-bloated athletes. Hitting 30 home runs a year was not enough when one could take pills and hit 70 and go from being rich and famous to being more rich and more famous, and why drive a two-ton truck through the crowded city when you could drive a three-ton truck with fat fenders – and drive it too fast too, while getting a tax break! And fuck the pedestrians, who are losers and in the way.

Psychiatrists are supposed to help us, but it is no criticism of Whybrow to suggest that he is a better diagnostician than therapist. Our fevered madnesses – for riches and celebrity and fried foods, for hurrying everywhere and nowhere, for continuous instant gratification – are interlocking, and they also constitute an event of mass psychosis that cannot be cured, only endured until it burns itself out. And endurance is, inevitably, an individual matter, a question of figuring out some way to remain sane in a forest fire of insanity.

"Meaning," Whybrow proposes toward the end of the book, "is found in the social bond.... It is intimacy, not materialism, that buffers the stress of everyday living."

This is sanely observed, and also easier said than done. Whybrow likes the word "balance" to describe a life in which the circus of commercial derangements is subordinated to human connection: to love. The former is here to stay, he seems to think, so we must accommodate it without being devoured by it – each of us a lion tamer. But a bare glance at the cultural data, from divorce statistics to the weepy lyrics of popular songs, tells not only of the human misery that rises from thwarted intimacy but of the inseverable relation between the thwarting and the wider social disease. I wonder if being born into this twisted environment amounts to a life sentence of sorts. Bad news for the young. For those of us less young, we can keep fantasizing about emigration – to Europe, maybe, though it was a sage American who said you can't go home again.