  This paper discusses the phenomenon of spontaneous symmetry breaking in the
Schr\"odinger representation formulation of quantum field theory. The analysis
is presented for three-dimensional space-time abelian gauge theories with
either Maxwell, Maxwell-Chern-Simons, or pure Chern-Simons terms as the gauge
field contribution to the action, each of which leads to a different form of
mass generation for the gauge fields.
