Psychoanalysis of Fight Club Using Freudian Concepts

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Fight Club is a movie that is based on a Chuck Palahniuk novel of the same name. The movie adaptation was written by Jim Uhls, directed by David Fincher and released October 15, 1999. The movie is about the life of the narrator, a depressed insomniac who works as a recall coordinator for an automobile company. The narrator is refused medication by his doctor, he turns to attending a series of support groups for different illnesses and uses these support groups for emotional release and this helps to temporarily cure his insomnia. This newfound cure ceases to help him when a girl, Marla Singer who is not a victim of any illness for which the support groups are offered begins to attend the support groups. The narrator returns from a business trip to find his apartment destroyed by an explosion, he calls Tyler Durden, a soap maker and sales man he met on one his business trips. Tyler offers the narrator a place to stay and together they start an underground “Fight Club” the narrator uses as his therapy for his insomnia. The club grows and becomes a source of psychotherapy for many other men. One of the concepts highlighted in the movie is how modern-day men in a supposedly civilized world use violent aggressive acts towards each other to as a means of emotional release and satisfaction.

In this paper I intend to explore how the ideas of civilization and the human aggressive instincts portrayed in the movie characterize reality. This is going to be achieved using psychoanalytical concepts of civilization and the individual’s inevitable quest for satisfying their instincts as identified in Sigmund Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents. The paper will focus more specifically on the instincts of aggression and self-destruction as op...

... middle of paper ...

...social relationships and cultural behavior, both of which play a key role in defining our perception of reality.

Works Cited

Fincher, David. Fight Club, (motion picture) 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment, 2000.

Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and Its Discontents, (Trans. James Strachey), New York: Norton Books, 1989.

Fine, Reuben. The Development of Freud’s Thought: From the Beginnings (1886-1900) Through Id Psychology (1900-1914) to Ego Psychology (1914-1939). New York: J. Aronson, 1973. Print.

Oliver, Roland and Anthony Atmore. Africa since 1800. 5th ed. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005. Print.

“Fight Club.” Wikipedia 2010. Wikipedia Foundation, Inc.. 7 November 2010

< http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fight_Club_(film).>

Uhls, Jim. Fight Club Final Script, Internet Movie Script Database. 7 November 2010

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