This is going to get very Freudian, but please bear with me.

In psychoanalytic terms, the Self has a narcissistic need to form a relationship with something called the Self-object. That can be anything: a spouse, a pet, a hot dog, a vacation, even a president of the United States.

The Self-object becomes a kind of extension of the Self. The Self desires it, identifies with it, transfers emotional meaning to it, relies on it for ego-strength and even a kind of love.

The Self/Self-object relationship is normal, apparently, despite its creepy name. But it also carries with it certain enormous risks: Spouses drift apart, pets die, hot dogs get cold, it rains on vacations, and presidents of the United States, even really awesome ones who are cool and promise to bring hope and change, can turn out to be not much better than any other meretricious, power-grabbing pol.

When the Self/Self-object relationship breaks down — for whatever reason — a number of things can occur. Mourning, anger, depression — all of these are natural, normal reactions to the disappearance or death of the Self-object. We’ve all been there. Perfectly normal stuff. Not pleasant, of course — who wants it to rain on his holiday? who wants a beloved pet to die? who wants a cold hot dog? — but we muddle through, with support from our friends and the help, if needed, of Old Rip Van Winkle bourbon or other psycho-pharmaceuticals, and we go on to create a blizzard of new relationships with new Self-objects, and the cycle wheels along.

We’re not a terribly attractive species, when you get right down to it — we’re needy and graspy and awfully nuts — but there’s a predictable quality to our emotional desperation that’s comforting. Plus, emotional neediness creates useful ancillary products: It’s given us painting, haute cuisine, country music, and golf, among other things. So all in all, not a bad exchange.

Sometimes, however, it doesn’t go down so smoothly. Sometimes the relationship between the Self and the Self-object gets ugly. And as the summer wears on and a certain Self-object president of the United States fails to get his health-care package passed, fails to stimulate a sluggish economy, fails to stem rising unemployment, fails to influence events in either Iran or Honduras, fails to keep his lofty promises on taxes, Guantanamo, victory in Afghanistan, transparent government, or anything, really, save the planting of a White House Victory Garden, the cascade of failures and broken promises and outright lies will shatter the relationship between the Self-object (Obama) and the Self (the credulous, trembling acolytes in the press and the star-struck thumbsuckers in the electorate). It will all end in what psychoanalysts call, I’m pretty sure, a shrieking, major freak-out.

I’m paraphrasing, of course. But that’s what we’re in for.

Some of it is going to be directed at us, the muttering skeptics from last autumn who didn’t see what all the shouting was about in the first place. Poor, out-in-the-cold conservatives are going to be blamed for Obama’s lack of progress on health care and stimulus and unemployment. The Self is going to zero in on the seven or eight remaining Republicans in the federal government and blame them for obstructing a plan they have no ability to obstruct. Look, in the coming weeks, for stories to dot the Self’s media outlets about the Tea Parties and the town-hall demonstrations that have disrupted the summer recesses of so many Democratic senators and congressmen. The stories will assert some kind of backstage manipulations by the RNC — dream on! — and will attempt to undermine the spontaneous, disorganized, refreshingly unruly nature of the protests, all in the service of protecting the Self-object.

We’ll probably hear the word “racism” a lot, too, as the Self continues its freak-out. Fox News, racism, gun-clingers — it’s going to be Scapegoat Autumn for our friends in the Self, and the best strategy for those of us on the outside of the psychodrama is to smile blandly, avoid eye contact, and walk quickly along. Do not engage, as they say in mental hospitals.

The good news: A lot of the freak-out will take place inside the Self itself, as it were. The Obama administration is going to go through an autumn of shake-ups and reorganizations and thinly veiled backbiting in the press. It will be cast as a reboot, the sign of a man in charge. “After Shaky Start, Obama Takes a Sharper, Realistic New Tack” will be one of the (many) headlines the New York Self-Times will print, desperately clinging to its beloved Self-object, but also acknowledging in its subconscious that the particular Self-object may not be working out. It may need to be demoted, in the ruthless way our subconscious self-preserves, to somewhere less important — say, between the rainy vacation and the hot dog. We’ll start hearing, then, about the whole concept of the presidency itself. Maybe it’s too much for one man. Maybe this is too ungovernable a country. Maybe the voters are too fickle. “A Not-So-Modest Proposal: A Serious Argument for a Parliamentary System” will be an article published by someone, somewhere, at some point during the dismal Obama popularity slide.

Sounds fun, doesn’t it? And richly deserved. Almost makes one excited about the prospects of a conservative revival.

Almost. Because the Left isn’t the only side with a personality disorder. The Right, too, has problems in the sanity department. For the past eight years, we developed a rather serious case of false object-permanence.

Infants, famously, have no sense of the permanence of the things around them — if they don’t see it in front of them, it doesn’t exist. Hold an object in front of a baby, make him smile, then quickly put the object behind your back, and to the baby it’s “Hey! That thing I smiled at doesn’t exist anymore!” Which brings tears and a sense of loss and a lot of other terrible things that can be worked out only later, during expensive therapy in which you, the parent, emerge as the chief and only villain.

At a certain point, though, the baby develops a sense of object-permanence, and when you hide the object behind your back, suddenly it’s “Hey! Stop withholding that object I want! It’s behind your back, you cruel and unloving God-giant!” Which brings tears and a sense of paranoia and a lot of other terrible things that can be worked out only later, during expensive therapy in which you, the parent, emerge as the chief and only villain.

Object-permanence, like the relationship to the Self-object, can be a good thing. It can also, in extreme cases, be a bad thing. You can start to think that something’s there when it’s not.

For almost eight years, we conservatives had a hyperactive sense of object-permanence. We thought that even though there was no evidence of conservative, small-government values in the Republican-led Congress (or the White House, for that matter), those values still existed somewhere, behind someone’s back. It turned out, as the economy collapsed and the banks were essentially nationalized and the government bailed out everything in sight, that when you can’t see free-market conservatism right there in front of your face at all times, it ain’t there.

On the right, we suffer from an infantile disorder. On the left, they’re victims of a malignant narcissism.

We’re quite a pair.