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.