Fight Club Psychoanalytic Notes

Narrator
• No name – universal
• Intellectualization is widespread, apathetic about boring life (when his apartment ex-plodes)
• is anal-retentive on interior decorating, perhaps from a fixating on going to the bath-room too much
• used to read pornography but now reads the Horchow collection, a magazine about in-terior decorating. Example of displacement and sublimation
• when he obviously puts a fake name sign of anal-retentive
• is in denial about his own dependency
• after the meeting, he realizes a sense of dependency from oral fixation
• reaction formation when he sees Marla. States that she doesn’t have testicular cancer (obviously – girl) while he doesn’t either
• after being punched by Tyler, his death drive is unleashed and his instinctual id over-powers the ego, causing him to act impulsively and fight back
• dad left when he was six years old – childhood issues
• sometimes Tyler speaks through him – id to ego
• when he hears Marla and Tyler having sex, displaces and sublimates sexual energy into reading, brushing teeth, washing clothes
• has come to smoke and have blood on clothes
• becomes brainwashed by Tyler (id)
• beats himself up when his boss doesn’t
• tricks his boss to give him what he wants
• has a weakened superego
• when he talks to Marla in the kitchen, he’s the only one who can hear Tyler’s sawing and him speaking. Tyler tells him what to say. Marla acts as a superego by asking him how he got a scar
• begins to reform his superego after Project Mayhem’s increased vandalism
• his mind is in conflict between his and Tyler’s

Tyler Durden
• smokes – oral fixation?
• Uncontrollable id – steals cars, gets pleasure from being hit, drinks, smokes, inserts por-nography clips into family films, pees into soup, rides bicycle in house, has sex with ran-dom women, chemically burns the narrator
• Thanatos – uncontrolled aggression
• No control – anal stage
• Symbolizes the narrator’s and everyone else’s id. Strengthened by the narrator’s reading of stories about people personifying themselves as people’s organs
• Cold father
• Libido – has sex with low standard women
• Convinces the narrator to steal fat from the liposuction
• Tricks the hotel he works at into a lawsuit
• Perverted sense of right – holds a man (Raymond) up at gunpoint so he can further pur-sue the career he wants (veterinarian) , blows up the narrator’s condo to make his life interesting

Marla Singer
• smokes – oral fixation?
• Denies that her zanax overdose is bad
• Promiscuous – low phallic stage
• Claims the narrator is a nutcase – reaction formation

Fight Club
• movie is a representation as a whole of Thanatos through Tyler’s anti-franchise rampage
• becomes a cult with organized labor and mindless following to create explosives

Other
• demolition is on the basement
• after testicular cancer, bob regresses into his phallic stage
• in the men’s discussion, Thomas says he’s glad for his ex-wife for having a baby with her new husband, an example of rationalization
• the moral support groups the narrator goes to are elevated, sometimes on the second floor: Freudian house analogy
• after fighting, Tyler walks on the street while the narrator walks on the sidewalk, show-ing the Freudian house analogy
• the official fighting occurs in the basement of the tavern: Freudian house analogy
• in the basement of the house are nitroglycerines