Psychoanalysis of Fight Club Using Freudian Concepts

1678 Words4 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: Psychoanalysis of fight club

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

Show More
Related

  • The Changing Duality of Race, Martha Hodes

    973 Words  | 2 Pages

    Mazrui, Ali A. "The Re-Invention of Africa: Edward Said, V. Y. Mudimbe, and Beyond." Research in African Literatures 36, no. 3 (Autumn 2005): 68-82.

    Read More

  • William Faulkner's The Sound and The Fury

    1107 Words  | 3 Pages

    Freud, Sigmund. Ego and the Id of Sigmund Freud (The Standard Edition of the           Complete Psychological works of Sigmund Freud Series).

    Read More

  • William Golding's Lord Of The Flies

    1124 Words  | 3 Pages

    Sigmund Freud was born in 1856 to Jewish Galician parents in the Moravian town of Pribor in the Austrian Empire (“Sigmund Freud” n. pag). During his education in the medical field, Freud decided to mix the career fields of medicine and philosophy to become a psychologist (“Sigmund Freud” n. pag). During his research as a psychologist, he conceived the Structural Model Theory, which he discussed in his essay Beyond the Pleasure Principle. The theory states that the human psyche is divided into three main parts: the id, ego, and super-ego (“Id, Ego, and Super-ego” n. pag). He concluded that the id was the desire for destruction, violence and sex; the ego was responsible for intellect and dealing with reality; and the super-ego was a person’s sense of right and wrong and moral standards (Hamilton, n. pag). Freud argued that a healthy individual will have developed the strongest ego to keep the id and super-ego in check (“Id, Ego, and Super-ego” n. p...

    Read More

  • Literary Analysis of Fight Club

    1468 Words  | 3 Pages

    Fight Club is a novel written by Chuck Palahniuk. This is a story about a protagonist who struggles with insomnia. An anonymous character suffering from recurring insomnia due to the stress brought about by his job is introduced to the reader. He visits a doctor who later sends him to visit a support group for testicular cancer victims, and this helps him in alleviating his insomnia. However, his insomnia returns after he meets Marla Singer. Later on, the narrator meets Tyler Durden, and they together establish a fight club. They continue fighting until they attract crowds of people interested in the fight club. Fight club is a story that shows the struggles between the upper class and lower class people. The upper class people here undermine the working class people by considering them as cockroaches. In addition, Palahniuk explores the theme of destruction throughout the book whereby the characters destroy their lives, body, building and the history of their town.

    Read More

  • Ted Bundy: The Mind of a Killer

    2059 Words  | 5 Pages

    Contemporary Psychology, 36, 575-577. Freud, S. (1961). The Species of the World. The Complete Works of Sigmund Freud. London: The Hogarths.

    Read More

  • Fight Club

    519 Words  | 2 Pages

    The Fight Club, directed by David Fincher, constructs an underground world of men fighting with one another to find the meaning to their lives. Ed Norton and Brad Pitt are the main characters who start the fight club. They make a set of rules that everyone must follow. The fight club exists because individuals get weighted down by possessions, causing them to miss the deep meaning of life. Most of the people in the fight club hold service jobs or lower level management jobs that are meaningless.

    Read More

  • West African Kingdoms

    996 Words  | 2 Pages

    Trupin, James E. West Africa - A Background Book from Ancient Kingdoms to Modern Times, Parent's Magazine Press. New York, 1991.

    Read More

  • Psychodynamic Theory

    857 Words  | 2 Pages

    In addition to Freud’s stages of development his best-known concepts are those of the id, ego, and superego (Crain, p. 268). The id personality called ‘the unconscious” is the personality that focuses on maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain through reflexes and drives such as hunger or bladder tensions (Crain, pp. 268-269). The id concept is impulsive, chaotic and unrealistic.

    Read More

  • Sigmund Freud Theory

    1633 Words  | 4 Pages

    Of the copious number of topics in the world today, nothing captivated Sigmund Freud’s attention like psychology did. Known as the founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud laid the foundations for comprehending the inner workings that determine human behavior (1). Through his involvement with the hypnosis, dream analysis, psychosexual stages, and the unconscious as a whole, Freud began a new revolution that faced its own conflict but eventually brought the harvest of new knowledge and clarity to the concept of the mind.

    Read More

  • Freud and Hansel and Gretel

    1624 Words  | 4 Pages

    Freud, S., & Strachey, J. (19621960). The Ego and the Super-ego. The ego and the id (pp. 19-20). New York: Norton.

    Read More

  • Freud and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein

    2600 Words  | 6 Pages

    Freud, Sigmund. New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis. Ed. James Strachey. Trans. James Strachey. Standard. Vol. 22. London: Hogarth Press, 1964.

    Read More

  • Fight Club Case Study

    1492 Words  | 3 Pages

    Our group collectively decided to choose the movie Fight Club as the movie to review for this case study. Fight Club was released on October 15, 1999 and is based off the novel written by Chuck Palahniuk in 1996. The movie was directed by David Fincher and featured several outstanding actors such as Brad Pitt and Edward Norton. We settled on reviewing Fight Club due to the films’ psychologically thrilling nature.

    Read More

  • Uganda: A Land of Pristine Beauty and Astonishing Ecosystems

    1875 Words  | 4 Pages

    Davidson, Basil. Modern Africa A Social and Political History. Ney York: Longman Group UK Limited, 1983.

    Read More

  • Technology and Happiness in Civilization and Its Discontents and Waiting for Godot

    1205 Words  | 3 Pages

    Freud believes that aggression is a primal instinct, and civilization thwarts this instinct, making man unhappy. Civilized society controls man's tendency toward aggression through rules and laws and the presence of authority. These mechanisms are put in place to guarantee safety and happiness for all individuals in a society. However, the necessity of suppressing the aggressive drive in m...

    Read More

  • Mischief, Mayhem, In Tyler We Trust: A Textual Analysis of Personality Disorders as Depicted in the Film Fight Club

    2608 Words  | 6 Pages

    Psychological disorders are widely represented in films, as well as in other media texts such as novels, television shows, etc. One film that portrays more than one example of a psychological disorder is Fight Club, a Twentieth Century Fox movie released with an R rating in 1999. Directed by David Fincher; and produced by Art Linson, Cean Chaffin, and Ross Grayson Bell, the movie mainly introduces Dissociative Identity Disorders (also known as Multiple Personality Disorders), but also hints at insomnia and depression. The movie is adapted from the book Fight Club written by Chuck Palahniuk. Fox marketed the movie using a “myriad of merchandise, including posters, the soundtrack, and even email addresses (yourname@fightclub.com)” (CNN). The movie’s production budget was set at $63,000,000 with the movie grossing $37,030,102 (Daily Box Office). The characters of the movie refer to themselves as the “middle children of history” with the feelings of having no purpose or place in life. They convey that they have no history-making events or real set goals and/or destiny to look forward to. They were brought up by society to believe that one-day they would be rich, famous and loved just as those depicted on television. This is symbolic of society during the surrounding time of the movie’s release. It is prevalent in modern society to strive to become someone/something that one sees in the media. The movie is directed towards Generation-X, but the “…hope was that the film would demonstrate the themes of the story to a larger audience. It would offer more people the idea that they could create their own lives outside the existing blueprint for happiness offered by society” (Palahniuk). This message was one that demanded that its viewers put all that drives them aside, and rethink what they had been taught from childhood. After the film’s release, instead of delivering the message that was intended, it was met with criticism and misunderstanding. This was due partly to the fact that it was scheduled for release shortly after the Columbine shootings. The movie became an easy target for those upset by the blatant violence which surrounded the Columbine incident. Although Fight Club is a film full of violence it is in reality one that promotes anti-violence, and points out to the audience the human impulses that cause violent behavior. Ironically, despite all of the med...

    Read More

More about Psychoanalysis of Fight Club Using Freudian Concepts

Open Document