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2 By the end of his life, Armand Hammer, the prominent industrialist, had alienated virtually all of his friend s and family, driven his corporation into financial ruin, and tainted his public reputation. Nevertheless, he seemed quite pleased with himself: "There has never been anyone like me, and my likes will never be seen again"; "The brilliance of my mind can only be described as dazzling. Even I am impressed by it" (Blumay & Edwards, 1992, pp. 256 and 94, respectively). Similar profiles can be found in recent biographies of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Murray Gell-Mann (Johnson, 1999) and British analytic philosopher A. J. Ayer (Rogers, 1999). Their several wives and children never quite adjusted to these brilliant scholars' exceptional self-centeredness, nor did professional colleagues easily forgive or forget Gell-Mann's and Ayer's clever but cruel putdowns. Despite frequent self-congratulations, these men were far from happy or secure. Hammer was plagued by self-doubts about his fame; Gell-Mann suffered from severe writer's block and intense fear of being proven wrong; Ayer drank heavily and came close to suicide. All three men fit Morf and Rhodewalt's characterization of the narcissistic personality. All were self-centered, competitive, and unempathic. All thrived for extended periods in environments in which competition and arrogance were common. Even in those environments, however, they stood out from their colleagues as lacking in the social graces that place at least a thin veneer of constraint on egotism and hostility. All three suffered periods of intense insecurity and disillusionment. What explains this kind of personality? In a series of enlightening empirical studies, Morf and Rhodewalt have gone far toward delineating the dynamics of narcissism. They have been particularly successful in revealing techniques used by narcissists to broadcast their assets and successes to themselves and others. However, the overall model summarized in Figure 1 has a number of limitations. Most notably, there is no clear and testable causal 'story' in the model 3 because it does not specify a causal flow among the main variables. Moreover, nothing about the model ties it specifically or uniquely to narcissism. It is essentially a generic representation of the self-regulatory process, containing global concepts such as Self-Knowledge and Social Relationships. An additional problem is that the model is exclusively focused on the interpersonal domain and neglects achievement-related processes and outcomes. Throughout the target article Morf and Rhodewalt attempt to explain how the model applies to narcissists; ideally this …