This paper examines the major conflicts and stresses which surround the coming of age in rural Ireland today and which commonly contribute to mental breakdown. The study is based on ten months of participant observation in an Irish-speaking village of Southwest Kerry, combined with weekly visits to the county mental hospital. The author uses a comparison of selected themes in four cards of the Thematic Apperception Test, which was administered in its entirety to 36 normal village adolescents between 15 and 19 years and to 22 single mental patients of both sexes between the ages of 15 and 35. The author concludes that the cost of inheriting the land and perpetuating the rural culture with its demands of an austere lifestyle leaves the Kerry adolescent and young adult few options. Among these are escape through emigration, stoical acceptance via repression, or periodic maladjustment during which times the delicate balance tips and the normally repressed individual is flooded with uncontrollable angers, resentments, and felt needs for attachment and intimacy with the absent or nonexistant "significant others" in his life. (Author/RM)