 My name is Sam Vaknin, and I am the author of Malignant Self-Labbi, Narcissism Revisited. The narcissist's paranoid ideation is his deep-rooted conviction that he is being persecuted by his inferiors, his detractors, or by powerful ill-wishers. Such paranoia serves two psycho-dynamic purposes. It upholds the narcissist's grandiosity and his inflated self-image on the one hand, and on the other hand, it fends off intimacy, which he dreads. Start with the grandiosity-enhancing type of paranoia. Being the target of relentless, ubiquitous, and unjust persecution proves to the paranoid narcissist how important and feared he is. Being haunted by the mighty and privileged validates his pivotal role in the scheme of things. Only vital, weighty, crucial, essential people are thus bullied and intimidated, followed and harassed, stalked and intruded upon, goes the narcissist in an unconscious dialogue. The narcissist consistently baits authority figures into punishing him, and thus into upholding his delusion of self-image as worthy of their attention. This provocative behavior is what we call projective identification. The paranoid delusions of the narcissist are always grandiose, cosmic, or historical. These pursuers and persecutors are always influential and formidable. They are after his unique positions, or they are out to exploit his expertise in special trades or occult knowledge, or they are there to force him to abstain and refrain from certain actions which endanger them or their interests. The narcissist feels that he is at the center of intrigues and conspiracies of colossal worldwide magnitudes. Alternatively, the narcissist feels victimized by mediocre bureaucrats and intellectual dwarves who consistently fail to appreciate his outstanding, really his unparalleled talents, skills and accomplishments. Being haunted by his challenged inferiors, substantiates the narcissist's cooperative superiority. Draven by a pathological envy, these pygmies collude to defraud the narcissist, badger him, deny him his due, denigrate, isolate and ignore him. The narcissist projects onto this second class of lesser persecutors his own deleterious emotions and transformed aggression. He attributes to them the very negative emotions that see the inside himself. He says that they are hateful, they are rageful, they are teeming and seething with jealousy, but actually this is exactly what's happening inside him. Narcissist's paranoid streak is likely as to erupt when he lacks narcissistic supply. The regulation of his labious sense of self-worth is dependent upon external stimuli, adoration, adulation, affirmation, applause, notoriety, fame, infamy and in general attention of any kind. When such attention is missing, lacking, deficient, the narcissist compensates by confibrillating. He constructs ungrounded narratives in which he is a protagonist and he uses these stories, these narratives, these fictions to force his human environment into complicity. Put simply, the narcissist provokes people to pay attention to him by misbehaving, or by behaving oddly or eccentricly, or by claiming that he is the victim of conspiracies. And then there's the intimacy retarding paranoia. Paranoia is used by the narcissist to ward off something he dreads, which is intimacy. The narcissist is threatened by intimacy because it reduces him to ordinariness by exposing his weaknesses and shortcomings and by causing him to act like everyone else, normally. The narcissist also dreads the encounter with his deep buried emotions, hurt, envy, anger, aggression, likely to be foisted on him in an intimate relationship, so he seeks to reverse intimacy once it has happened or to avoid it altogether. The paranoid narrative legitimizes intimacy-repelling behaviors, such as keeping one's distance, secrecy, aloofness, reclusion, aggression, intrusion on privacy, lying, desultoriness, itineracy, unpredictability, and idiosocratic or eccentric reactions. All these are fully justified when one finds himself at the center of a conspiracy or persecution. Gradually, the narcissist succeeds to alienate and wear down all his friends, colleagues, well-wishers, and mates, which is precisely what he wanted. The narcissist wants to be left alone. Even his closest, his nearest and dearest, his family, feel emotionally detached and burnt out after a certain period of time. The paranoid narcissist ends his life as an oddball recluse derided, feared and loathed in equal measures. The narcissist's paranoia, exacerbated by repeated rejections and by the process of aging, pervades his entire life and diminishes his creativity, adaptability, and functioning. The narcissistic personality, buffeted by paranoia, becomes ossified and brittle. Finally, atomized, isolated, and useless, this personality succumbs and gives way to a great void. The narcissist is consumed and is no more.