Fight Club

Fight Club is an important film revealing the results of civilization which causes emerged new ego far from real ego. We examined this popular rich content movie looking from psychoanalytic perspective. This film expresses an important Freudian theme, Oedipal Complex. The relation between characters; Marla, Tyler and Jack shows us that clearly. Jack (the narrator) is an unsatisfied and frustrated person in his job, suffering from insomnia and having consumerism attitudes making far from his insticts. In therapy groups that he goes for his insomnia treatment, Jack meets Marla. Jack creates an Idealized Ego known as Tyler Durden to do all of the things that he feels that he can not do, or is too weak to do. Tyler is portrayed in the movie as a character that is a flawless representation of male mankind; therefore, the actor playing him is Brad Pitt, the sexiest man nowadays. Tyler destroys the capitalist structures that pushed Jack away from the Real in the beginning. Tyler is an idealized ego, also since he makes real Jack’s desires, he is an id. The narrator ( Jack) of Fight Club is fixated in the phallic stage. Symptoms of phallic fixations are sexual inhibition, fear of castration, homoerotic tendency. The entire film is permeated with castration anxiety and phallic imagery, including the subliminal penis flashed across the screen and the dildo in Marla’s apartment. According to Freud, the cause of fixation at this stage is an unresolved Oedipal complex. The narrator has failed to resolve his Oedipal complex because his father abandoned him. Here Tyler is father, Marla is a mother figure. To liberate himself from phallic stage he must find his father or find one. However, the Oedipal complex is best expressed in the scenes in which Tyler and Marla, to Jack’s frustration, have wild sex in Tyler’s house. To the extent that Tyler is a father surrogate for Jack, Jack is witnessing the Freudian “primal scene”. Freud described the primal scene as the event