My name is Sam Vaknin, and I am the author of Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited.

The narcissist’s personality is precariously poised, his access to and intimations of his positive emotions restricted and ambiguous, and his overpowering negative emotions so rampant that the narcissist needs to compensate for his vulnerabilities with a pyrotechnic display of dominance and abuse.

Narcissists often call themselves alpha males, while actually they are mere bullies.

But such antisocial maltreatment of others, especially of his nearest and dearest, such mistreatment does not render the narcissist strong, either in reality or in the eyes of others.

He does, however, endow the narcissist with a reputation for obnoxiousness and even repellent clownishness.

Similarly, when the narcissist does his thwarted imitation of being soft, the thespian effort strains the seams of his affected contact.

The narcissist becomes maudlin, maudlin exaggerates, cries, goes over the top with demonstrations of gratuitous and smarmy courtesy or feigned pity, goal-oriented charity, and his version of default pseudo-empathy.

The narcissist comes across as a badly programmed humanoid robot with an insufficient table of data on how to act human.

The narcissist immediately fosters unease and trepidation in people around him, and this is the uncanny valley effect.

The narcissist is not capable of true intimacy and of emoting, because deep inside where a human being should have been, the abode is empty, the flag is at half-mast.

The narcissist walks, the narcissist talks, but otherwise is long dead, like the zombies and vampires of your…