My name is Sam Vaknin. I am the author of Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited.
The narcissist and the histrionic patient flaunt their sex appeal, their virility or femininity, their sexual prowess, their musculature, their physique, their training or athletic achievements.
The cerebral narcissist, on the other hand, seeks to enchant and entrance his audience with intellectual pyrotechnics.
Many narcissists of both types brag about their wealth, their health, possessions, collections, spouses, children, personal history, and family tree.
In short, the narcissist brags forth and drags about anything that would garner him attention and render him alluring.
Both types of narcissists, the somatic and the cerebral, firmly believe that being unique, they are entitled and deserve special treatment by others. They deploy their charm offensives in order to manipulate their nearest and nearest or even complete strangers.
And they use these people as instruments of gratification, as sources of narcissistic supply, tension, ejaculation, admiration. Exerting personal magnetism and charisma become ways of asserting control and ovulating other people’s personal boundaries.
The pathological charmer feels superior to the person he captivates and fascinates. To him, charming someone means having power over her, controlling her, or even subjugating her. It is all a mind game intertwined with a power play.
The person to be thus enthralled and charmed is an object, a mere prop in the narcissist theater of life. He is of a dehumanized utility.
In some cases, pathological charm involves more than a grain of sadism. It provokes in the narcissist sexual arousal by inflicting the pain of subjugation on the beguiled who cannot help but be enchanted by him.
Counterintuitively, the pathological charmer engages in infantile magical thinking. He uses charm to help maintain object constancy and to fend off abandonment.
In other words, he uses charm to ensure that the person he has bewitched won’t disappear on him suddenly.
Pathological charmers react with rage and aggression when their intended targets prove to be impervious and resistant to their lure.
This kind of narcissistic injury, being spurned and rebuffed, makes them feel threatened, rejected, and denuded. In other words, the rejected and denuded.
Being ignored amounts to a challenge to the narcissist uniqueness, entitlement, control, and superiority.
Narcissists wither without constant narcissistic supply. When their charm fails to elicit narcissistic supply, they feel announced, failures, non-existent, disintegrating, and even dead.
As is to be expected, they go to great lengths to secure narcissistic supply. It is only when their efforts are frustrated that the mask of civility and congeniality drops and reveals the true face of the narcissist, a predator on the prowl.
