ABSTRACT
The art historian John Berger maintains that a woman’s psyche is divided in two by virtue of her need to be simultaneously both actor and observer. He says of the woman: She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself. Whilst she is walking across a room or whilst she is weeping at the death of her father, she can scarcely avoid watching herself walking or weeping. In society, girls and boys grow up in significantly different contexts for psychological learning, and the differences in these learning environments may importantly influence the later psychological functioning of both sexes. The advance in cognitive abilities during adolescence that enables the teenager to describe herself in more abstract terms may bring with it certain liabilities, since such descriptions are more remote from observable actions and behavior and are, therefore, “more susceptible to distortion”. For many girls, ruptures in the core sense of self—ruptures of coherence and agency—have their origins in adolescence.
