I've also read a bit of psychoanalysis, so I understand where you're coming from. I used to be into Karen Horney a lot, and I think the idea about attacking the subjective premise that everyone essentially has in interesting (everyone's behavior is a result of some sort of a subjective premise, perhaps an emotion). The idea of self-criticism is interesting, and learning to tone down the dial of self-criticism is something that you can practically apply to your personal situations. A person whose too critical of oneself might take most criticisms as devastating, but people who are not very self-critical may take most criticism in stride. They don't accept it or they don't register it.
However, over the years I've learned that it was more like "Socionics 2.0", or "pre-Socionics", depending on which you started from. There may be some genuine insights on human nature that may be interesting, but in the end they're usually just the opinions of the psychoanalyst, and shouldn't be taken as gospel truth. Actually it's kind of similar to Socionics in that it start out with educated guesses or conjectures of the psychoanalyst, but it's lacking in the critical approach.
Anyway, tough love is usually just a way to justify and rationalize love by saying that it's a form of love.