 My name is Sam Vakny. I'm the author of Malignan Self-Lover, Narcissism Revisited. Often, when I reread articles I have written only a month ago, and had deemed, in the time of composing, to be the epitome of incitiveness and proficiency, I find the same articles woefully lacking, verbose and obscure. What causes this dramatic shift in judgment within an inordinately short period of time? How could I have so misperceived my own work? Why do I judge the same article to be a masterpiece when I have composed it, and then trash a month later? What new have I learned, and how was I enlightened? The narcissist catexes, in other words, emotionally invests with grandiosity everything he owns, everything he does, his nearest endears, his work, his environment, and of course, whatever he produces, articles, works of art, compositions. But as time passes, this pathologically intense emotional aura, emotional investment, fades. The narcissist finds faults with things and people. He had first thought impeccable and perfect. Here, the narcissist energetically berates and denigrates that, which he equally zealously exalted and praised only a short while before. These are wild swings. This intolerant inexorable and disconcerting roller coaster is known as the idealization-devaluation cycle. It involves serious cognitive and emotional deficits, and a formidable series of triggered defense mechanisms. The cycle starts with the narcissist's hunger for narcissistic supply. Narcissistic supply, to remind you, is the panoply of reactions to the narcissist for itself, to his feigned facade of omnipotence and initiates. The narcissist uses these inputs to regulate his fluctuating sense of self-worth. It is important to distinguish between the various components of the process of narcissistic supply, which is the trigger of supply, which is the person or the object that provokes the source into yielding narcissistic supply by confronting the source with information about the narcissist for itself. Then we have the source of narcissistic supply, which is the person who provides narcissistic supply. And then we have the supply itself, which is the reaction of the source to the trigger. So the source reacts to the trigger by producing narcissistic supply. The narcissist homes in on triggers and sources of supply. He looks for people, possessions, creative works, money, anything that can generate the attention, adulation, admiration that he so craves. And he imbues these sources and triggers with attributed uniqueness, imputed perfection, brilliance and grandiose qualities, munitions, omnipotence, omnipresence. He makes them as grandiose as himself to make them worthy of providing him with narcissistic supply. He filters out any data that contradicts these fantastic misperceptions. He rationalizes, he intellectualizes, denies, represses, projects and in general defends against contrarian information. So let's go back to my articles. My articles are triggers. The readers of my articles are my sources of narcissistic supply. The fact that my articles are being read and that they influence my readership is narcissistic supply to me, as are my readers written and verbal reactions, both negative and positive. When I produce an essay, I'm proud of it. I'm emotionally invested in it. I regard it as ratified perfection. Though I try very hard, I can see nothing wrong with my vocabulary, grammar, syntax, turn of phrase and ideas. In other words, I idealize my articles or essays. I idealize my creative efforts. Why is it then that when I revert to the same pieces of writing, a mere few weeks later I find the syntax tortured, the grammar shoddy, the choice of words forced, the whole piece repulsively bloviated, and the ideas hopelessly tangled and dim. In other words, why do I then devalue my work, as I have idealized it earlier? Well, the narcissist realizes and resents his dependence on narcissistic supply. Moreover, deep inside, the narcissist is aware of the fact that for self is an untenable sham piece of fiction, a concoction, a lie, and a confabulation. Still, he holds himself to be omnipotent, so he believes in his ability to make everything come true, to asymptotically approximate his grandiose fantasies. The narcissist is firmly convinced that, given enough time and practice, he can and will become his lofty false self. And this is the narcissist's idea of progress, the frustrating and masochistic pursuit of an ever-reciting mirage of perfection, brilliance, omniscience, omnipresence, and omnipotence. The narcissist dumps all sources and triggers of supply because he is convinced that he is perpetually improving and that he deserves better and that better is just around the corner. He is driven by his own impossible ego ideal. So, an article I would write tomorrow is bound to be far superior to yesterday's output. Miraculously, and without any effort or investment on my part, my grammar and syntax will have mended, my vocabulary will have expanded, my ideas will have resolved themselves into coherence. Last month's essays are bound to be inferior in comparison to next month's articles because I am always getting better, I'm always getting closer to my false self, which is perfect, omnipotent, omniscient, and so on. I am a work in progress. I reach ever closer to flawless consummation. The chronology of my articles nearly reflects my increasingly elevated state of perfected being.