Sue Gerhardt’s latest book The Selfish Society is tagged ‘popular psychology’ on its back cover, but her publishers might well have added ‘polemic’. The Oxford-based psychotherapist argues that current society has got itself into a moral pickle, championing selfish individualism and material gain, when our basic instinct as human beings is not to accrue wealth but to be caring and to be cared for.

She says that the emotional well-being of Britain is in a parlous state, with family breakdown, addiction and behavioural problems rife, and people “falling into this trap of thinking they need money or power or fame to make them be somebody”. No wonder we’re in such a mess, when you consider that “we often grow up without our basic emotional needs being met well”.

Gerhardt, who lives in Wolvercote, argues that a more emotionally rounded society would bear fewer scars. I ask her whether she intended her book to be a call to arms.

“Yes I did. When I started writing it, of course, I had no idea that things would blow up the way they have — the economic crisis, the expenses scandal and so on.

“I started writing it four years ago. I was very interested in how politicians were behaving at the time — that was the Bush and Blair era. I was concerned about what I was hearing from politicians and I wanted to bring psychological knowledge to bear on that. But of course, it has escalated dramatically. I never imagined that this selfishness would get played out in such an obvious way.”

The Selfish Society is her second book. It follows on from her first, Why Love Matters, about how the care of a baby in its first two years shapes its brain, but goes one step further, asking how society at large has been forged through emotional nourishment, or lack of it. “It’s arguing that we’ve got to meet people’s early basic emotional needs. Then we have a much greater chance of becoming co-operative, empathetic adults who are less drawn to materialism and selfishness of various kinds. I’m saying that babyhood is really an important part of generating our social values. It’s not the only one, of course. But it’s pretty crucial.”

Her first book was a huge success. Its commonsense thesis about how happy babies led to better-adjusted adults was reinforced by scientific data. I ask Gerhardt why her first book struck such a chord; it was a bestseller soon after its publication and continues to sell well.

“I think people want to know about the science,” she says. “We all have to make decisions about the way we look after our babies and if we do it informed by science, then it throws a new light on it.”

Although both Why Love Matters and The Selfish Society rely heavily on academic research, much of Gerhardt’s understanding of babies comes from practical experience.

Ten years ago, she set up the Oxford Parent-Infant Group. It’s a charity to which any parents can refer themselves and which has helped myriad parents over the last decade. “We’ve helped people with a disabled baby or people who have had premature babies and have had difficulties connecting emotionally when they’ve got home; parents who are depressed and couldn’t really give their full attention to babies because of that; parents who have had difficult childhoods and find it difficult to relate to their babies. We try to help people make relationships with their babies — and it’s not just for mothers, but father also”.

The charity has also helped her understand babies “deeper and deeper” and crystalise ideas for her books. It strikes me that working as a psychotherapist and as an author are polar opposites: the intimacy of helping individuals seems to contrast with the desire to call out to a wider readership.

“I’ve always had these two impulses — the listening and caring one, but also the creative impulse, to communicate with people.” She went to film school, such was her desire to be a mass communicator, but psychoanalysis held a deeper allure for her, in the end. As for her interest in politics and sociology, the focus of her latest book, she comes from a Conservative family (her mother was a mayor and county councillor) but was always left-leaning herself, involved in student politics and the women’s movement of the 1970s.

What does she make of the Cameron Clegg coalition? “Maybe MPs will actually have to listen to each other,” she says with a note of cheer. “Maybe people’s ordinary opinions can actually count for something now, and we’re not going to just have this predictable debate.”

* The Selfish Society is published by Simon and Schuster at £12.99.