Among the books listed in her Who's Who write up are:
The Experience of Depression, 1978,
The Construction of Life and Death, 1982,
Depression: the way out of your prison, 1983,
Living with the Bomb: can we live without enemies? 1985,
Beyond Fear, 1987,
The Successful Self, 1988;
The Depression Handbook, 1990
Time on our Side, 1994;
Dorothy Rowe’s Guide to Life, 1995;
The Real Meaning of Money, 1997;
My Dearest Enemy, My Dangerous Friend, 2007;
What Should I Believe? 2008;
A summary of her ideas was recounted in a Guardian article:
"If you make happiness your goal, then you're not going to get to it," says psychologist Dorothy Rowe. "Philosophers have been saying it for thousands of years. The goal should be an interesting life."
"Rowe has devoted her life to trying to help people free themselves from what she famously termed the "prison" of depression, to live that interesting life. In more than a dozen books, the self-help pioneer has set out what she believes are the obstacles that hold people back, and offered a recipe for, if not happiness, then a greater degree of satisfaction with their lot.
"Drawing on her own life experience, including a miserable childhood and a marriage ended by her husband's infidelity, as well as her clinical work as an NHS psychologist, Rowe has developed a clear set of ideas about depression, and the best way to fix it. In the process, she has become something of a guru, with some admirers convinced that just reading her books is enough to bring about a transformation, even a cure."
The same article provides a biographical glimpse of this writer:
"Rowe's early training in psychology was Freudian, and she has retained a strong sense of the importance of childhood events and relationships. Her early life, as "a country girl" in Newcastle on the east coast of Australia, was confusing and unhappy. She doesn't know if her mother really wanted children, but her father wanted a son. "He was very kind, but he hated any kind of trouble," she says. "As he got older he sort of withdrew, he just wanted a quiet life and would never intervene in anything that would get my mother going." ...
"The family was dominated by her mother, whose fundamental dishonesty and insistence on her own point of view to the exclusion of all inconvenient facts drove Rowe herself to the brink of psychosis. "I know now that in my last year at school, had there been some kind of disaster in my life in that year, just a car accident or something like that, I wouldn't have been able to hold myself together . . . I'd have become very psychotic." In fact, nothing happened to tip the vulnerable teenager over the edge, and she left home to study for a degree in psychology 100 miles away in Sydney.
"She became a teacher and began working as an educational psychologist, got married and had a son, Edward. Then she discovered that her husband, a lawyer, was having an affair. Partly out of respect for her adult son's feelings, Rowe has resisted writing in detail about her marriage, but in her new book, Why We Lie, she offers the story of the poet Cecil Day-Lewis, who was serially unfaithful to his wife Mary, as a kind of analogy. She suggests Mary was a substitute mother-figure for Day-Lewis, with the consequence that when she became pregnant, he felt betrayed. "He did what men like him always do in this situation. He had an affair."
"Unlike Mary, however, Rowe did not wait for her husband to leave. She ended the marriage and, in 1968, decided to move to England. One of her correspondents had advised her there were jobs, so she signed up for a PhD at Sheffield University.
"Now 79, Rowe lives alone in a quiet garden flat in Highbury, north London. She chooses her words carefully, and speaks in a distinctive hushed voice. She has recently had cataracts removed from both eyes, and is finding her improved vision a revelation....
"Rowe's son lives in Australia. He remains the most important person in her life, and she moved to London partly to make it easier to meet when he travels to Europe. ... Marriage, she decided, was "worth trying only once".
"...But while titles such as The Successful Self, Wanting Everything and Dorothy's Rowe's Guide to Life placed Rowe in the vanguard of the expanding self-help industry, Lott believes "the way she's labelled a self-help guru does her a great disservice". She remains a champion of the original self-help idea, "the notion that the experts are rubbish and we can do this ourselves", but in conversation and in print she is more thoughtful and more political than much of the faux-spiritual, money-seeking advice that saturates the "self-help" market...."
From one of her books, What Should I Believe?: Why Our Beliefs about the Nature of Death and the Purpose of Life Dominate Our Lives (2012) we read: [I]f you said there is a power beyond me..it may...be the working of the law of karma....[I]f I go out and kick the cat...[there will be repercussions.]
Recently, she wrote that she could not be considered a "proper psychologist" as she was too aware of the "curious mystery" of life. Which sounds appropriate for someone who lists their hobby (Who's Who) as "Looking at the sea."
A summary of her ideas was recounted in a Guardian article:
"If you make happiness your goal, then you're not going to get to it," says psychologist Dorothy Rowe. "Philosophers have been saying it for thousands of years. The goal should be an interesting life."
"Rowe has devoted her life to trying to help people free themselves from what she famously termed the "prison" of depression, to live that interesting life. In more than a dozen books, the self-help pioneer has set out what she believes are the obstacles that hold people back, and offered a recipe for, if not happiness, then a greater degree of satisfaction with their lot.
"Drawing on her own life experience, including a miserable childhood and a marriage ended by her husband's infidelity, as well as her clinical work as an NHS psychologist, Rowe has developed a clear set of ideas about depression, and the best way to fix it. In the process, she has become something of a guru, with some admirers convinced that just reading her books is enough to bring about a transformation, even a cure."
The same article provides a biographical glimpse of this writer:
"Rowe's early training in psychology was Freudian, and she has retained a strong sense of the importance of childhood events and relationships. Her early life, as "a country girl" in Newcastle on the east coast of Australia, was confusing and unhappy. She doesn't know if her mother really wanted children, but her father wanted a son. "He was very kind, but he hated any kind of trouble," she says. "As he got older he sort of withdrew, he just wanted a quiet life and would never intervene in anything that would get my mother going." ...
"The family was dominated by her mother, whose fundamental dishonesty and insistence on her own point of view to the exclusion of all inconvenient facts drove Rowe herself to the brink of psychosis. "I know now that in my last year at school, had there been some kind of disaster in my life in that year, just a car accident or something like that, I wouldn't have been able to hold myself together . . . I'd have become very psychotic." In fact, nothing happened to tip the vulnerable teenager over the edge, and she left home to study for a degree in psychology 100 miles away in Sydney.
"She became a teacher and began working as an educational psychologist, got married and had a son, Edward. Then she discovered that her husband, a lawyer, was having an affair. Partly out of respect for her adult son's feelings, Rowe has resisted writing in detail about her marriage, but in her new book, Why We Lie, she offers the story of the poet Cecil Day-Lewis, who was serially unfaithful to his wife Mary, as a kind of analogy. She suggests Mary was a substitute mother-figure for Day-Lewis, with the consequence that when she became pregnant, he felt betrayed. "He did what men like him always do in this situation. He had an affair."
"Unlike Mary, however, Rowe did not wait for her husband to leave. She ended the marriage and, in 1968, decided to move to England. One of her correspondents had advised her there were jobs, so she signed up for a PhD at Sheffield University.
"Now 79, Rowe lives alone in a quiet garden flat in Highbury, north London. She chooses her words carefully, and speaks in a distinctive hushed voice. She has recently had cataracts removed from both eyes, and is finding her improved vision a revelation....
"Rowe's son lives in Australia. He remains the most important person in her life, and she moved to London partly to make it easier to meet when he travels to Europe. ... Marriage, she decided, was "worth trying only once".
"...But while titles such as The Successful Self, Wanting Everything and Dorothy's Rowe's Guide to Life placed Rowe in the vanguard of the expanding self-help industry, Lott believes "the way she's labelled a self-help guru does her a great disservice". She remains a champion of the original self-help idea, "the notion that the experts are rubbish and we can do this ourselves", but in conversation and in print she is more thoughtful and more political than much of the faux-spiritual, money-seeking advice that saturates the "self-help" market...."
From one of her books, What Should I Believe?: Why Our Beliefs about the Nature of Death and the Purpose of Life Dominate Our Lives (2012) we read: [I]f you said there is a power beyond me..it may...be the working of the law of karma....[I]f I go out and kick the cat...[there will be repercussions.]
Recently, she wrote that she could not be considered a "proper psychologist" as she was too aware of the "curious mystery" of life. Which sounds appropriate for someone who lists their hobby (Who's Who) as "Looking at the sea."
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