ABSTRACT
In this chapter I try to show how the emotional experiences a girl goes through in her adolescence can be related to her mental health or ill-health in adulthood. Thus, I do not want to focus especially on the actual problems or disturbances of adolescence that we encounter in the course of our work with them, but on the implications these may have for the sort of adulthood that person is likely to experience. Because, when we are faced with having to make decisions about whether or not we should intervene in a young person’s life, or whether we should at least be concerned about an adolescent, one of our criteria must be the sort of adulthood, normal or abnormal, that we think this person is moving towards. (We also thought it would help us to be more specific in our thinking if we talked separately about the male and female adolescent; in the literature, it always seems as if, when adolescents in general are talked about, the comments are more applicable to the male.) I will limit myself therefore to those emotional problems that appear to be specific to women in their adulthood and then try to relate these back to their adolescence. 28This also means that I will have to omit referring to many aspects of adolescent development, not because I do not think that they are important, but because they do not seem specifically related to those problems of adulthood that I am considering here.
