1. Alloplastic Defenses and Magical Thinking
2. Perceiving Others
3. Sources of Supply
4. The Eye of the Psychopathic Storm
5. Splitting and Choice
6. Personality Traits or Styles and Personality Disorders
7. Toxic Relationships

1. Alloplastic Defenses and Magical Thinking

Alloplastic defenses are an integral and important part of most personality disorders (and all Cluster B PDs). Yet, personality disorders are frequently co-morbid with other mental health disorders where autoplastic defenses are more prominent. Additionally, magical thinking - common to Cluster B PDs and to the Schizotypal PD - often intervenes.

Narcissists think: "I am immune, I am untouchable, nothing can happen to me, I am a perfectly functioning machine". It is like an incantation.

But there is also the opposite kind of magical thinking.

Instead of saying "I am perfect - but the Universe (or God) is against me", people with developed magical thinking might think: "I attract bad luck, I am a magnet for mishaps and bad fortune". But, in both cases, it is the Universe, or God, or Society, or Something Outside the patient that is to blame for the patient's misfortune. The patient's failures and misadventures are none of his responsibility or fault. He is - in both cases - passive, the victim of a persecutory world.

2. Perceiving Others

Narcissistic psychopaths have no friends, or lovers, or spouses, or children, or family - they have only objects to be manipulated.

Narcissists have no problem perceiving ideas (many narcissists are intellectually gifted). But they do have a problem perceiving other people's ability to conceive of ideas, to have their own needs, emotions, and preference. Wouldn't you be startled if your television set suddenly informed you that it would rather not work on a Sunday? Or if your vacuum cleaner wanted to befriend you?

To narcissists, other people are instruments, tools, sources - in short: objects. Objects are not supposed to have opinions or to make independent choices and decisions - especially if they don't comply with the narcissist's worldview or plans, or if they do not cater to his needs.

3. Sources of Supply

Narcissists feel so bad when abandoned or confronted - this is called narcissistic injury or narcissistic wound - that it prompts them either to coerce you back into an imagined relationship (stalking) - or to delete you altogether from their mind and history (discard and devalue).

Yet, compelled by their addiction - by the inexorable need to regulate their labile sense of self-worth - narcissists cannot remain for long without Sources of Narcissistic Supply. So they move on to the next source in lightning speed.

But Narcissists/Psychopaths rarely abandon a Source of Supply. He may be keeping you on ice, part of his "stable", a reserve - and will re-emerge when he is in need of a dose of Narcissistic Supply and all other sources have been depleted.

4. The Eye of the Psychopathic Storm

Contrary to misinformed opinion, all narcissists and psychopaths maintain a stable island in their otherwise tumultuous lives. It could be a job, a mother, an ideology, an imagined lover (erotomania), a collection, a hobby, an object (car or house), or even a pet.

Stalking is about maintaining this "eye of the storm" and about possessing it. The stalker exerts control over the prey's life by intruding and, thus, by intimidating. To him, fear equals possession and possession equals "love". Being ambivalent about women, the stalker has swings between the Saint and the Whore views of womanhood.

To the sick mind of the stalker, a "no" is never a "no". It is proof that you want further contact or that you don't know what is good for you or that you want him so much that you are denying it or that it is actually a yes.