Fight Club: Film Striving For Superiority

Fight Club

Chuck Palahniuk’s 1996 novel Fight Club was adapted into an American film in 1999 by director David Fincher. This successful film perfectly illustrates Alfred Adler’s theory of the superiority complex in “Striving for Superiority”. The unnamed protagonist’s unconscious is depicted by Tyler Durden, a personality who in the end of the film is revealed as a figment of the protagonist’s imagination, plays an important role in understanding the conflicts within his psyche. This one particular scene where Tyler Durden and the protagonist share an emotional conversation about their relationship with their distant father evidently demonstrates their struggle to over-compensate for the feeling of being unwanted.

Adler’s superiority complex suggests that everyone has feelings of
inferiority and these feelings start at an early age.
According to the superiority complex, a child may feel inferiority because he or she is unwanted, has a physical disability or is a pampered child. In this particular situation, the protagonist is an unwanted child. He reveals in the bathroom scene with Tyler Durden, his alter ego, that if he would want to fight anyone it would be his father. This suggests that the protagonist now as an adult feels more powerful maybe through the “Fight Club” he has created and no longer feels “weak and powerless” as a child would feel under a parent’s authority. He goes on describing his relationship with his father as someone he does not know since he left him when he was 6 years old. Then he goes on to say “I mean, I know him” suggesting some sort of possible communication between them. He says that his father was building a franchise because every 6
years he would go off and start a new family with a new woman abandoning everything. This symbolism is used here to show how anyone is the same as the previous and how as a child the protagonist did not feel as an individual or loved. In this dialogue, Durden speaks of his father being remote and only having long distant conversations with him over the phone. During Durden’s description of “his father”, the protagonist interrupts “sounds familiar” implying they are talking about the same person: same father. The only time Durden would speak to his father would be when he needed an advice on what he should do with his life. He seems to yearn for approval from him father or attention to reverse his “unwanted child” feelings.

In “Striving for Superiority” Alder claims that there are three ways to over come this universal feeling of inferiority: over-compensate, resignation or compensation. The protagonist in “Fight Club” over-compensates to succeed or to feel superior. He thrives through fighting and indulges completely into this new activity. This activity consumes his entire routine and convinces him he has finally found a solution to his problems. Infatuated with the idea to compensate through Fight club the protagonist overindulges into his pursuit to find strength, power and true masculinity. These are all things his father failed to teach him as a child.