 My name is Sam Vaknin and I am the author of Malignan Saint Flava, Narcissism Revisited. The behaviour of the narcissist is very inconsistent. It is as though the narcissist has many personalities, not to say, multiple personalities. How can this be explained? It is important to understand the deep inside behind the façade and behind all the acting. The narcissist is chronically depressed and unhedonic. He is unable to find pleasure in love, he is unable to laugh, and in the long run as a result, he is never truly loved. The narcissist is forever in the pursuit of excitement and drama, intended to alleviate his all-pervasive boredom and melancholy. The narcissist, put less charitably, is a drama queen. Needless to say that both the pursuit itself and its goals must conform to the grandiose vision that the narcissist has of his false self. The pursuit and the goals must be commensurate, with the narcissist's view of his own uniqueness and entitlement. The process of seeking excitement and drama cannot be deemed by the narcissist or by others to be humiliating, belittling, or common, or pathetic. The excitement and the drama generated by the narcissist must be truly unique, groundbreaking, breathtaking, overwhelming, unprecedented, and on the no circumstances routine or pedestrian. Actually, the very act of dramatization is intended to secure what we call ego-sinterning, a good feeling. The narcissist says to himself, surely the dramatic is also special. It's also meaningful, eternal, memorable. I myself am also dramatic, and therefore I exist in heaven. Meaning and memorable and special. The drama supports the narcissist's sense of being unique. The narcissist, always a pathological liar and the chief victim of his own strategies and deceit, can and does convince himself that his antics and exploits are cosmically significant. Thus, existential boredom, self-directed aggression known as depression and the compulsive quest for excitement and titillating drama lead to the relentless pursuit of narcissistic supply, attention, adulation, admiration, or barring these, being feared and hated. The processes of obtaining, preserving, accumulating and recalling narcissistic supply take place in something called the pathological narcissistic space. This is an imaginary environment, a comfort zone, invented by the narcissist himself. It has clear geographical and physical boundaries, it's at home, it's a neighbourhood, it's a workplace, it's a city, a country. And the narcissist strives to maximize the amount of narcissistic supply that he derives from people within the pathological narcissistic space. There, in the pathological narcissistic space, the narcissist seeks admiration, adoration, approval, applause, or as a minimum, attention. If not fame, then not a rioting. If not real achievements, then contrived and imagined ones. If not real distinction, then concocted and forced uniqueness. If not to be loved, then to be feared or to be hated. Narcissistic supply substitutes for having a real vocation or avocation and actual achievements. It displaces the emotional rewards of intimacy in mature relationships and supplants them, substitutes for them. The narcissist is ruefully aware of this substitutive nature of narcissistic supply core, of his own inability to have a go at the real thing. His permanent existence is in fantasy there, intended to shield him from his self-destructive urges. And paradoxically, this very feigned and fake existence only enhances his self-defeating and self-destructive behavior. This state of things makes the narcissist feel sad, depressed and ranged at his own helplessness in the face of his disorder and furious at the discrepancy between his delusions of grandeur and reality, what I call the grandiosity gap. This state of things is the engine of his growing disappointment and disillusionment. His unhedonia, inipotence, his degeneration and ultimate, ugly decadence as he grows old. The narcissist ages disgracefully and graciously. He is not a becoming sight as his defenseless crumble and harsh reality intrudes the reality of his own self-imposed mediocrity and wasted life. These flickers of sanity, these reminders of his downhill path, get more ubiquitous with every passing day of confibrillated existence. The narcissist has a dam fending off reality, but gradually as he grows older cracks appear, some water drops penetrate, and then the flood, the other lunch, as he completely collapses in the face of overwhelming evidence of decay, mediocrity, lack of achievements and complete renaissance. The more fiercely the narcissist fights this painfully realistic appraisal of himself, the more apparent its veracity. Infiltrated by the trojan horse of his intelligence, the narcissist defences the overwhelmed and this is followed by either spontaneous healing or a complete meltdown. The narcissist's orthological narcissistic space incorporates people whose role is to uphold, admire, adore, approve and attend to the narcissist. Extracting narcissistic supply from these people cause for emotional and cognitive investments, stability, perseverance, long-term presence, attachment, collaboration, emotional agility, people skills and so on. All these things are in short supply with the narcissist. But all this inevitable toil contradicts the deeply ingrained conviction of the narcissist that he is entitled to special and immediate preferential treatment. The narcissist expects to be instantaneously recognized and is outstanding, talented and unique. He does not see why this recognition should depend on his achievements and efforts. He feels that he is unique by virtue of his sheer existence, all he has to do is be there to be recognized. He feels that his very life is meaningful, that it encapsulates some cosmic message, mission or process. Narcissistic supply obtained through the investment of efforts and resources such as time, money and energy is to be expected, routine, mundane. In short, such supply is near useless. Useful narcissistic supply is obtained miraculously, dramatically, excitingly, surprisingly, shockingly, unexpectedly and simply by virtue of the narcissist being there. No action is called for as far as the narcissist is concerned. Cajoling, requesting, initiating, convincing, demonstrating and begging for supply are all acts which starkly contrast with the grandiose delusions of the narcissist and his self-deception. Narcissist feels that he should not have to beg or to ask or to initiate or to convince or to cajole or to beg for supply. He has to come his way automatically. He has to flow merely because he exists. Additionally, the narcissist is simply unable to believe in certain ways, even if he wants to. He cannot get attached. He cannot be intimate, persevered, stable, predictable or reliable, because such conduct contradicts his emotional involvement-prevention mechanisms or measures. This is a group of destabilizing behaviors intended to forestall future emotional pain inflicted on the narcissist when he is inevitably abandoned or when he fails. If the narcissist does not get attached, he cannot be hurt. He will not endure pain. If he is not intimate, he cannot be emotionally blackmailed and he will not go through the pangs and pines of abandonment. If he does not persevere, he is nothing to lose. If he does not stay put, he cannot be expelled. If he rejects or abandons, he cannot be rejected or abandoned. He has to be active and passive. The narcissist anticipates the inevitable schisms of emotional abysses in a life fraught with gross dishonesty. And so, the narcissist shoots first. Indeed, it is only when the narcissist is physically mobile and besieged by problems that the narcissist has a respect from his maddeningly nagging addiction to narcissistic supply. And this is the basic conflict of the narcissist. The two mechanisms underlying his distorted personality are completely incompatible. One mechanism calls for the establishment of a pathological narcissistic space for the continuous gratification that is entailed in such a space by extracting narcissistic supply regularly, predictably, reliably. And the other mechanism urges the narcissist not to embark on any long-term project to move continuously, to disconnect, to dissociate, to abandon. Only other people can provide the narcissist with his badly needed doses of narcissistic supply. But the narcissist is loath to communicate and to associate with these people in an emotionally meaningful way. The narcissist lacks the basic skills required in order to obtain his drug. The very people who are supposed to sustain his grandiose fantasies through their adoration and attention mostly find the narcissist repulsive eccentric, weird, dangerous. They prefer not to interact with him. And this predicament can be actually called the narcissistic condition.