Love, Hate and Welfare: Psychosocial Approaches to Policy and Practice, Lynn Froggett, Bristol,  The Policy Press, UK, 2002.

In Love, Hate and Welfare, Lynn Froggett brings theory brilliantly alive through a constant interweavement of psychoanalytic, sociological and philosophical concepts together with politics, policy and personal lives. In this way, she manages to be both extremely erudite and grounded - not an easy thing to achieve, and something that too many academic texts fall short of. This is a broad, wide ranging and ambitious book that takes a psychosocial approach in order to map the complex connections between states of mind, interpersonal relations, welfare institutions and the cultural and political world. It contains a sharply critical analysis of the policies and rhetoric of the Conservative governments of the 1980s and 1990s, and New Labour's Third Way, such as the promotion of market principles, the construction of the ideal welfare subject as an autonomous, powerful and rational ‘chooser’ and, the pursuit of effectiveness, productivity, performance and regulation. Froggett takes the reader confidently through areas of domain that are more usually kept apart, and in doing so transgresses theory and practice boundaries. These disciplinary transgressions are highly creative, supporting the kind of imagination central to the development of a reparative culture of welfare that she advocates.

Chapter one sets the scene by mapping the principles of equality and attachment across successive welfare paradigms in post-war Britain. Four ideal-type models of welfare are identified: the paternalistic, social democratic welfarism of ‘old welfare’; the market-led, privatised model of ‘no welfare’; the ‘mixed welfare’ model characterised by New Labour's Third Way; and an emergent alternative model ‘beyond welfare’. In Chapter two, Melanie Klein's work on attachment and Donald Winnicott's work on separation provide a theoretical framework through which to make links between early experiences of care, defensive psychic mechanisms, such as splitting, and the development of recognition and