ABSTRACT
Psychoanalysts have long struggled with the treatment of narcissistic issues within the context of the more standard drive-related transference issues. Some of women patients increasingly present in the author clinical practice with obsessive anxieties and concerns about their looks: about feeling fat, with complaints about what their lovers look like, and so forth. Traditional theories about why women try to look beautiful have focused singularly on wishes to avoid the sight of the “ugly” female genital and the consequent castration fears such a sight evokes. Not only must women fix their "ugliness", they must also renounce their intellectual pursuits. The women are generally unaware of the degree to which they idealize men on the one hand and denigrate them on the other. The treatment of women obsessed with thinness is usually accompanied by acting out and by splits in the transference.
