Friends and Enemies: Our Need to Love and Hate [Hardcover]

‘Her appeal rests on a combination of clarity of vision, sanity, compassion, deep-seated rationalism and an eye, like Jane Austen’s, for social satire. Her work forces you to think for yourself, challenge received ideas and take responsibility for your own life’
- Linda Grant

‘Dorothy Rowe is full of robust good sense, rare intuitive wisdom and unhurried sensitivity. She pursues meaning, self-knowledge and understanding with patient ferocity. She is a giver of courage’
- Nigella Lawson

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.

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 relationship, and in 'Friends and Enemies' she sets out to do just that.

But is 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.

Dorothy Rowe worked as a teacher and child psychologist in Australia, then took her PhD at Sheffield University. From 1972 until 1986 she was head of the North Lincolnshire Dept of Clinical Psychology. She is now engaged in writing, lecturing and research, and is renowned for her work on how we communicate, and why we suffer.