The fact that people choose to hang on to their relationships with him, despite his intolerable behaviour, proves to the narcissist his uniqueness and superiority. The narcissist's aggression thus serves to reassure him.

When he doesn't have access to willing victims, the narcissist indulges in fantasies of unmitigated aggression and sadism. He might find himself identifying with figures of outstanding cruelty in human history or with periods, which represent peaks of human degradation.

So, the narcissist's intimate relationship are fraught with ambivalence and contradiction: love-hate, well-wishing and envy, fear of being abandoned with a wish to be left alone, control-freakery and paranoid fears of persecution. The narcissist's psyche is torn in an all-pervasive conflict which never ceases to torment him, regardless of external or extenuating circumstances.

Mental Map # 1

Bad, unpredictable, inconsistent, threatening object leads to defective internalisation (introjection of bad objects) and to an unresolved Oedipal Conflict.

Damaged object relations aggression, envy, hatred
Low self-esteem
Fear that these emotions will erupt
Narcissistic defence mechanisms
Repression of all emotions, good and bad (the self as object)
Compensatory functions
Redirection of negative emotions at the self
Grandiosity, fantasies
Avoidance of emotional situations
Uniqueness, demands adulation, "I deserve" (entitlement)
Intellectual compensation, exploitativeness, envy, lack of empathy, haughtiness
Objectification of the OTHER
Formation of False Self (FS)
Defective interpersonal relationships (transference relationships)
Narcissistic Supply Sources (NSS)
Fear that the (potentially) meaningful other (external reinforcement of FS):
1. Will invoke deep emotions and provoke negative ones
2. Fear of abandonment (result of malnourished True Self - TS)
3. Narcissistic vulnerability: True Self (TS)
a. Negation of uniqueness
b. Ego hurt when abandoned
Anhedonia and dysphoria
Feeling of annulment, disintegration (of TS)
Fear of exposure, condemnation, persecution (FS)
Ego-dystonia (stress)

The above mental map includes three basic building blocks of the soul of a typical narcissist: the True Self, the False Self and the Narcissistic Sources of Supply.

Appendix: Libido and Aggression

Narcissism is a direct result of the aggression the narcissist experienced in early life. To better understand the narcissist's intimate relationships, we must first analyse this facet of narcissism: aggression.

Emotions are instincts. They form part of human behaviour. Interactions with other people provide a framework, an organisational structure into which emotions fit nicely. Emotions are organised by object relations to the libido (the positive pole) or to aggression (which is negative and associated with hurt).

Anger is the basic emotion underlying aggression. As it fluctuates, it is transformed. Janus-like, it has two faces: hatred and envy. The libido has sexual excitation as its basic emotion. It is an ancient tactile remembrance of the mother's skin and the wholesome feeling and smell of her breasts that provoke this excitement.

So important are these early experiences, that an early age pathology of object relations - a traumatic experience, physical or psychological abuse, abandonment - move aggression to a dominant position over the libido. Whenever aggression rules over libidinal drives, we have a psychopathology.

The emotional twins - libido and aggression - are inseparable. They characterise all references of the self to an object. A world of emotionally-invested object relations is formed with each such reference.

The dynamic unconscious is made of basic mental experiences, which are really dyadic relations between self-representations and object representations in either of two contexts: elation or rage.

A subconscious fantasy of merging or unification of the self and the object prevails in symbiotic relationships - both in euphoric moods and in aggressive and wrathful ones.