Anger has evolutionary and adaptive functions. It is intended to alert the individual to a source of pain and irritation and to motivate him to eliminate it. It is the beneficial outcome of frustration and pain. It is also instrumental in the removal of barriers to the satisfaction of needs.

As most sources of bad feelings are human, aggression (in the form of rage) is directed at (human) "bad" objects - people around us who are perceived by us to be deliberately frustrating our wishes to satisfy our needs. At the furthest end of this range we find the will and wish to make such a frustrating object suffer. But such desire is a different ball game: it combines aggression and pleasure, therefore it is sadistic.

Rage can easily convert to hatred. There is a wish to control the bad object in order to avoid persecution or fear. This control is achieved by the development of obsessive control mechanisms, which psychopathologically regulate the repression of aggression in such an individual.

Aggression can assume many forms, depending on the sublimatory venues of the aggressive reaction. Biting humour, excessive candour, the search for autonomy and personal enhancement, a compulsive effort to secure the absence of any kind of outside intervention - are all sublimations of aggression.

Hatred is a derivative of anger which is intended to facilitate the destruction of the bad object, to make it suffer and to control it. Yet, the process of transformation alters the characteristics of rage in its manifestation as hatred. The former is acute, passing and disruptive - the latter is chronic, stable and connected to character. Hatred seems justified on the grounds of revenge against the frustrating object. The wish to avenge is very typical of hatred. Paranoid fears of retaliation accompany hatred. Hatred thus has paranoid, sadistic and vengeful characteristics.

Another transformation of aggression is envy. This is a greedy wish to incorporate the object, even to destroy it. Yet, this very object which the envious mind seeks to eliminate by incorporation or by destruction is also an object of love, the object of love without which life itself will not have existed or will have lost its taste and impetus.

The narcissist's mind is pervaded by conscious and unconscious transformations of enormous amounts of aggression into envy. The more severe cases of Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) display partial control of their drives, anxiety intolerance and rigid sublimatory channels. The magnitude of hatred in such individuals is so great, that they deny both the emotion and any awareness of it. Alternatively, aggression is converted to action or to acting out.

This denial affects normal cognitive functioning as well. Such an individual has intermittent bouts of arrogance, curiosity and pseudo-stupidity, all transformations of aggression taken to the extreme. It is difficult to tell envy from hatred in these cases.

The narcissist is constantly envious of people. He begrudges others their success, or brilliance, or happiness, or good fortune. He is driven to excesses of paranoia, guilt, and fear that subside only after he "acts out" or punishes himself. It is a vicious cycle in which he is entrapped.

The New Oxford Dictionary of English defines envy as:

"A feeling of discontented or resentful longing aroused by someone else's possessions, qualities, or luck."

And an earlier version (The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary) adds:

"Mortification and ill-will occasioned by the contemplation of another's superior advantages."

Pathological envy - the second deadly sin - is a compounded emotion. It is brought on by the realisation of some lack, deficiency, or inadequacy in oneself. It is the result of unfavourably comparing oneself to others: to their success, their reputation, their possessions, their luck, their qualities. It is misery and humiliation and impotent rage and a tortuous, slippery path to nowhere. The effort to break the padded walls of this self-visited purgatory often leads to attacks on the perceived source of frustration.

There is a spectrum of reactions to this pernicious and cognitively distorting emotion:

Subsuming the Object of Envy through Imitation

Some narcissists seek to imitate or even emulate their (ever changing) role models. It is as if by imitating the object of his envy, the narcissist becomes that object. So, narcissists are likely to adopt their boss' typical gestures, the vocabulary of a successful politician, the dress code of a movie star, the views of an esteemed tycoon, even the countenance and actions of the (fictitious) hero of a movie or a novel.

In his pursuit of peace of mind, in his frantic effort to alleviate the burden of consuming jealousy, the narcissist often deteriorates to conspicuous and ostentatious consumption, impulsive and reckless behaviours, and substance abuse.

Elsewhere I wrote:

"In extreme cases, to get rich quick through schemes of crime and corruption, to out-wit the system, to prevail, is thought by these people to be the epitome of cleverness (providing one does not get caught), the sport of living, a winked-at vice, a spice."