Central to narcissistic behaviour is the tendency to elicit admiration from others, but it is done in such a high-handed way that these same others are, in time, alienated from the narcissist. This is widely thought to be due to some internal deficit in the narcissist psyche which leads them to fail at what is to them of utmost importance. This paper uses a social rather than an intrapsychic perspective to question the failure hypothesis and to show by means of self-organization theory that the apparent failure can be seen as part of a goal-directed way of conserving an ambivalent autonomy or identity. Narrative descriptions are presented for two cases of female narcissism to illustrate how narcissistic behaviour operates differently in different cases in order to conserve successfully and simultaneously both poles of an ambivalent autonomy.