SURVIVING YOUR TEENS

By ELIZABETH GLEICK

IN THE LAND OF POPULAR PSYCHOLOGY books, nothing works so well as a bunch of case studies, paired with a lot of enthusiastic word of mouth. The current No. 1 paperback best seller, Mary Pipher's Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls (Ballantine; $12.50), has the combination just right. Dozens of troubled teenage girls troop across its pages: composite sketches of Charlottes, Whitneys and Danielles who were raped, who have bulimia, who have pierced bodies or shaved heads, who are coping with strict religious families or are felled by their parents' bitter divorce. There's a girl here for everyone: either the girl the reader once was or the sullen one now lolling about the reader's house listening to Hole. "The book put a name and a face on something I was already sensing," says Annette Davis, a San Jose, California, mother of two, who has given copies of the book to her children's teachers. "It wasn't just about my daughter, though. It was about me. It spoke to something in my experience in adolescence and some of the pain I still carry around."

Thanks to readers like Davis, who are buying the book by the dozens to give to friends and showing up to hear Pipher, a Lincoln, Nebraska, clinical psychologist, speak, Reviving Ophelia has become a phenomenon. Originally rejected by 13 publishers, the hard-cover book was published in 1994 by Putnam. The book really took off, though, when the paperback came out last March, recently hitting No. 1 on the New York Times best-seller list, and Pipher's tours on the lecture circuit keep the pot boiling. Explains Linda Grey, president of Ballantine, the paperback's publisher: "Mary is able to convey difficult information in a very reassuring, comfortable and positive way."

Certainly the premise of Reviving Ophelia (which takes its title from the doomed Hamlet heroine) is a familiar one. Pipher believes adolescence is an especially precarious time for girls, a time when the fearless, outgoing child is replaced by the unhappy and insecure girl-woman. "Something dramatic happens to girls in early adolescence," Pipher writes. "Just as planes and ships disappear mysteriously into the Bermuda Triangle, so do the selves of girls go down in droves." She decided to write the book because her own practice was increasingly occupied by girls--mostly white and middle class, she says--coping with such problems as eating disorders, depression, substance abuse and self-mutilation.

Pipher's view--and what, no doubt, helps make her work so popular--is that, for the most part, the culture, not the parents, are to blame. Pipher points out that girls enter junior high school faced with daunting magazine and movie images of glossy, thin, perfect women. She argues that pop culture is saturated with sex; violence against women is rampant; and drugs and alcohol are far more accessible than they were during her 1950s girlhood in a small Nebraska town. "I don't think the past was idyllic," says Pipher, 48, a mother of two whose husband, Jim, is also a psychologist. "But children felt safer."

Pipher is not the first to explore this territory. Moving at a gallop, she conflates a sizable and important body of work, from Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex to Alice Miller's The Drama of the Gifted Child, to Peggy Orenstein's 1994 SchoolGirls: Young Women, Self-Esteem and the Confidence Gap. Harvard psychology professor Carol Gilligan, whose 1982 In a Different Voice, a landmark text in the study of women's development, receives only a passing mention. "Mary Pipher has succeeded in reaching a very wide audience with these ideas, and I think that's terrific," says Gilligan. "What she's doing is building on our work."

Unlike many of her predecessors, though--and much like another current best-selling author, Hillary Clinton--Pipher does offer commonsensical, unthreatening solutions. She suggests, for instance, that parents immerse themselves in their daughters' life and take the trouble to learn about the pressures at their school. And through therapy she tries to teach the girls to turn their pain outward: to write their angry thoughts in journals, rather than cut, starve or kill themselves; to get involved in charity work when they feel shunned by classmates; to remind themselves daily of the ways in which they are valuable and unique.

Readers find Ophelia both heartbreaking and exhilarating. "I experienced a spiritual awakening," says Maureen Kelly Neerland, who monitors domestic violence and rape cases in the Minneapolis courts. She got in touch with Pipher and is trying to establish a national clearinghouse for girls' self-esteem programs. Pipher also receives a steady stream of mail from families seeking help; others phone, eager to hop a plane to Lincoln.

Pipher, whose next book, the shelter of each other (putnam), about families, will be published in april, acknowledges that the storms of adolescence do not affect girls alone. "if there's a therapist who wants a writing project," she advises, "i think there's a need for a book about how the culture affects the mental health of boys." Reported by Andrea Sachs/Lincoln

With reporting by ANDREA SACHS/LINCOLN