The Dollhouse Has Nine Rooms

By ANNIE ATURA

April 16, 2010

The premise of The Nine Rooms of Happiness, a book written by the editor of Self magazine and her psychiatrist friend, is that a woman’s mind is like a house. It needs to be tended to by the lady of the house. When it is clean, the woman who owns it is happy. Every morning we women should wake up and ask ourselves, “Where’s the mess today?”

Questionable? I think so.

Lucy Danziger and Catherine Birndorf, M.D. presented this hypothesis at a Master’s Tea in Pierson this past Thursday. Their newly published self-help book aimed at women attempts to make psychodynamic therapy friendly by presenting it in an easily digestible and stereotypically feminine format. The book is full of short sentences, and examples are drawn from the life of an “ordinary” woman on a hard day – troubles at work, troubles at home, and, of course, troubles with weight. At the tea, Birndorf said that she wrote the book because she wanted to bring therapy down from the “ivory tower.” Nevertheless, the authors’ assumptions are suspiciously condescending.

In keeping with her co-author, Danziger’s attitude throughout the tea expressed her conviction that all women are fundamentally alike. She claimed to be an excellent editor of Self, not because she herself was a “guru,” but because she struggles with the same issues that the gurus on her staff intend to solve. In an effort to illustrate her everywoman status, Danziger spoke about her tendency to binge-eat, her constant obsession with thinness, and her celebration of her loss of 25 pounds in 18 months (she had learned to control her psychological rumination, she said). She also described the “negative editorializing in [her] head,” her constant worry that she should have been “thinking about Haiti.”

Danziger’s psychological model is hardly universal. While she herself may suffer from these afflictions, they are not necessarily ones that plague all women. Not every woman needs to allay a lurking suspicion that she shouldspend more time devoted to big issues and less time fretting over her personal life. Indeed, it’s an individual’s prerogative to concern herself with Haiti and other major catastrophes. Danziger also complained about worrying about a fight with her daughter while she was in a board meeting, claiming that she was inappropriately bringing one “room,” that is to say, one realm of her life, into another. But it is not the case, as she claimed, that distraction from home is an almost exclusively female issue. Neither is it the case that every woman ought to focus all of her emotional energy on the task at hand.

The cover of the book features a cartoon of a slim white woman in a slinky red dress and heels. She has perfectly coiffed straight hair and bangs. In one image, she leaps with joy, her arms in a Vegas v above her head; in another, she has the (literal) key to her house of happiness in her hand and a large pink bag on her arm; in a third she kicks one leg behind her in a parody of female bliss. It’s telling that the authors chose a cartoon to portray the psychological life of women. Like Self magazine, The Nine Rooms of Happiness claims that it’s just being honest about women’s concerns while insidiously dictating what those concerns should be.

Danziger and Birndorf propose to treat women’s problems with precisely the close-minded, gendered sensibility that created those problems in the first place. Their fluffy medicine may produce a warm feeling in some, but it can hardly be applauded as “self-help.” It’s just another form of the role-reinforcing “help” that women get all the time from the outside world.

Annie Atura is a junior in Yale College. She is a staff writer for Broad Recognition.