A Freudian Analysis of Fight Club

A Freudian Analysis of Fight Club

Although the movie Fight Club is usually thought of simply to be a group of men fight-ing, it has a much darker and insightful meaning. With the narrator anonymous throughout the film, his struggles come to symbolize the everyman’s problems with himself and society. The fight club that spontaneously starts up symbolizes the death drive (Thanatos) of Sigmund Freud’s dynamic theory of personality and how humans are constantly in a state of aggression in order to survive. Through Freud’s psychoanalytic perspective, the film depicts the internal “fights” be-tween the narrator and the other characters as battles over conformity in corporate America.

In the beginning of the film, the narrator is apathetic towards his life and largely compla-cent about his place in it. He is also anal-retentive about the interior decoration in his condomi-nium, of which he may have developed from a fixation of the anal psychosexual stage. This is enforced when he mentions that he used to read pornography but now reads the Horchow Collection, a magazine about interior decorating. In this situation, he employs the ego defense mechanism of sublimation through displacement, rechanneling his sexual energy into his compulsive nature. Although he hates his job, the narrator employs the ego defense mechanism of intellectualization to provide him solace. Because his job takes him to numerous locations, he experiences perpetual jet lag that manifests itself into insomnia, causing the narrator to become out of touch with his life instinct of sleep. After he is recommended by his doctor to visit support groups to find out what real suffering is, he calls himself by many different names, foreshadow-ing Tyler’s eventual introduction. By disguising himself, he regresses to the phallic psychosexual stage because he fails to identify with himself, of which is probably influenced by a lack of a fa-ther figure in his childhood. In a quasi-form of projection, the narrator vicariously mourns with the other members of the support groups until he discovers another imposter, Marla. Initially, he ironically condemns her through the reaction formation, but comes to accept her due to their sim-ilar ties to the groups. The narrator’s life has become darker but will only continue to do so.

A while after the support groups, the narrator meets Tyler Durden, a man that the narrator comes to envy because of his interestingness. Tyler comes to symbolize an uncontrollable id by stealing cars, drinking, smoking, urinating into soups, and riding a bicycle in the house in which he lacks control, perhaps because of an underdeveloped anal stage. His constantly hungry Thana-tos and fashionable wardrobe provides his pleasure principle with more than enough satisfaction, so much that it interests the narrator. He is also masochistic, enticing the narrator to punch him. After he punches the narrator back, the narrator’s powerful superego begins to diminish in im-portance and his id comes to control his life. Thus, Tyler can be seen as the narrator’s id, while society’s norms symbolize the narrator’s superego. This realization is enforced by the narrator reading stories about how the author personified himself or herself as an organ in the body of another person. Also, this is evident when Tyler begins to tell what the narrator should say and, sometimes, when he actually speaks for the narrator. When the narrator overhears Marla and Ty-ler having sex, he sublimates his sexual energy into productive activities such as reading, brushing his teeth, and washing clothes. After a while, the narrator adopts several of Tyler’s pleasure activities such as drinking, smoking, and swindling corporations.

Due to the fight club’s popularity, Tyler turns it into a cult, causing the narrator to ques-tion the club’s overall purpose. When Tyler issues a vandalizing spree known as Project Mayhem, the narrator does not feel much remorse due to his weakened superego. However, after he sees Tyler hold up a random man at gunpoint so he can further pursue the career he wants, the narrator begins to see Tyler’s perverted sense of right and rebuild his superego. His superego is further strengthened when he hears that his close friend, Bob, has been shot because of Tyler’s orders. The narrator’s journey to find the know hiding Tyler is symbolic of the ego trying to reason with the id. Eventually, the narrator realizes that he is Tyler and that he is the architect of Project Mayhem. His realization that he is in conflict with himself and Tyler is representative of the battles that occur within the mind, particularly between the id and the ego.

Although the narrator is severely wounded and has blown up several buildings, he has technically won by defeating Tyler, his symbolic id. The narrator has come to symbolize the struggles that everyone must go through daily, from pursuing our pleasure to conforming to so-ciety. The director himself does this by splicing random stills throughout the movie, with the last one being a penis, which was one of the jobs Tyler did. Thus, his actions show the universal competition between the id and the ego. His actions are a reminder that although following our human instincts in this movie resulted in widespread destruction, they are the principles that al-low us to survive and live.