- Paperback: 560 pages
- Publisher: HarperCollins; New edition edition (3 Sep 2001)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0006530583
- ISBN-13: 978-0006530589
- Product Dimensions: 19.2 x 12.8 x 3.4 cm
- Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 268,187 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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More About the Author
Product Description
Review
‘There is a wealth of thought provoking material in this bok… every page triggered for me flashes of recognition’
Val Hennessy, Daily Mail
Product Description
One of our most admired and loved psychologists turns her attention to the essence of the good relationship, and why we need enemies as well as friends.
At the end of each of her books Dorothy Rowe describes how happiness and satisfaction come not just from achievements but from enjoying good relationships with other people. To date, however, she has not explored what constitutes a rewarding friendship, and in Friends and Enemies she sets out to do just that.
But if human beings crave good relationships, they also need bad ones. In imagining we have enemies we at least have the comfort of knowing that someone, somewhere, is thinking of us. At every level both people and nations seek out hate-figures, whether they are children at school or the Serbs and Albanians in Kosovo.
By delving into what it is that makes us hate as well as what makes us love and need each other, Dorothy Rowe addresses fundamental issues of human behaviour, drawing upon her own prodigious wisdom and the work of neuroscientists and intelligence specialists to show not only what friendship is but how it may be learned as a skill.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
35 of 35 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
Those readers familiar with the work of Dorothy Rowe will realise immediately that Friends and Enemies is more ambitious in breadth of research, theory and knowledge than her previous books. Geographically, the essays in the book range through minutely observed, intensely descriptive encounters with citizens of Northern Ireland, Kosovo, South Africa and Lebanon, to well-documented conversations with asylum seekers and refugees worldwide, whose stories of appalling trials and tortures illustrate Ms Rowe's primary premise. We need enemies as well as friends as both render our existence valid. As detailed in previous books, she divides human beings into two distinct psychological types, introvert and extravert, whose relationships may be complementary or antagonistic. These two types can be further sub-divided; I was fascinated to discover the "socially-skilled introvert" and the "shy extravert", each of whom may live life believing themselves their own opposite!
Each of us lives trapped within our learned observations and can never fully know anything or anyone outside of our own perception of the world, dubbed our "meaning structure" by Ms Rowe. Our relationships, individually and on a global scale are further complicated by what Ms Rowe calls "primitive pride", a defence structure whereby our learned defence mechanisms spring into action to protect our meaning structure from damage or even annihilation from other persons or even from ourselves. We work with the tool of meaning structure, which we protect with the tool of primitive pride. Individually, this can lead to intense damage in human relationships and to conflict and war between neighbouring communities and distant countries. We must learn to change, to accept ourselves and other people as individuals on a personal, political and global level if we are to reduce human conflict in the coming century. Political leaders must be held to be the prime movers in instigating change, but the resposibility lies with all of us. Friendship and meaningful human communication are essential to all of us in our search for a rich and varied life. Dorothy Rowe's formidable knowledge of the human condition is tempered by her familiar intelligent empathy and down to earth wisdom, honed through many years' experience both as psychologist and lifelong observer of her fellow man. Not for the first time she threads her narrative with references to the emotional scarring of her own early life with her family in Australia. Each time I finish a book by Dorothy Rowe, I am astonished and grateful that she is so willing to share.
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