ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — These are emotional times in Pakistan, particularly since President Obama told its leaders last week to fight harder against Islamist extremists, and expanded a deeply unpopular covert air strike program in Pakistani territory.

After Mr. Obama’s speech at West Point, newspapers and talk shows here were full of heated commentary that those demands would push Pakistan further toward disaster. “Approval of increasing drone strikes in Pakistan,” blared one headline. “A very difficult time is approaching for Pakistan,” a former foreign secretary intoned on television.

Some of the feeling is not hard to understand. Who would want another country using missiles against targets in one’s own? But there was something else, an anti-Americanism whose depth and intensity I could not fully grasp. So to find out where Pakistan’s head was, I sought help from one of the country’s top psychiatrists.

What I got was not so much an explanation as an illustration, in all its anger, of the embittered language in which a great many Pakistanis discuss their relationship with America — living proof of just how different America’s understanding of Pakistan is from its own view of itself.