Friends and Enemies: our need to love and hate Dorothy Rowe HarperCollins, 551pp, £19.99 ISBN 0002559390

Friends have never been more important. We live in an age when the definition of family is becoming ever more inclusive. It is no coincidence that a television sitcom about six close friends who all live within a web of each other's lives leads the viewing ratings. Friends are the new family. My "brother" does not necessarily share my blood.

The Friends formula - for those of you who have been on the moon or watching only BBC for the past five years - is not only to play on emotions within the group, but also to introduce an outsider - a stranger - and watch the drama play itself out. Friends and enemies. We've all been there.

If only it were that simple. The psychologist Dorothy Rowe begins her new book with a quotation: "You don't make friends, you recognise them." True. But, as Rowe found once she started to ask people to define friendship, there are as many definitions as there are people. Having taken the reader through the gamut of human nature, from tribal roots to the civilised state we believe ourselves to have achieved today, Rowe also shows us that the definition of enemy is far more simple: an enemy is born, rather than made.

Rowe's suppositions are based on a belief in a "meaning structure", through which we translate our interactions with others. Our membership of a group, or tribe, is dependent on the extent to which our meaning structure relates to that of the other members of the tribe. So he is my enemy because he is white while I am black, or he is Christian while I am Jewish, he is Catholic while I am Protestant, he is Serb while I am Kosovan Albanian, and so on. Rowe ranges across continents, religions and political movements in search of what she calls "primitive pride" - something that both demands and supports the blind faith that allows one man to wreak the most atrocious crimes on his neighbour. "It seems that 7,500 years has not been enough for most people to learn how to separate the ideas of 'stranger' and 'kill'," she writes.

It is a relief, therefore, to come upon a chapter, at the end of the book, called "The End of Enmity". Citing the work of Senator George Mitchell in Northern Ireland and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, Rowe argues that, although supremely difficult, forgiveness and change are possible. Yes, but for how long?

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