ABSTRACT
This chapter includes articles about women and narcissism as seen from various psychoanalytic perspectives. Freud discussed the concept of narcissism by considering its primary and secondary states and by defining narcissism as the libidinal investment of the ego with its specific attributes of self-regard and the ego ideal. He proposed a developmental schema for narcissism that involved an antithesis between libido directed toward the self (ego) or toward objects, with symptoms related to excessive investment in either direction. Proposing both developmental and energic concepts for narcissism, Freud struggles with the definitions of primary and secondary narcissism. In "The Mother-Child Relation", maternal love is depicted as a peculiar mixture of narcissism and object love or as the most selfless self-love. In The Self and the Object World, Edith Jacobson employs the economic definition of narcissism as the libidinal cathexis of the self and does not devote her specific focus to female development.
