Fight Club Essay Example

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 in which children observe the parents engaged in intercourse. The child cannot understand the event and may think that the father is harming the mother. Further, Freud’s central thesis is that men have an Oedipal wish to have sex with the mother and kill the father. Marla is the main reason of creating Tyler because with Tyler Oedipal triangle is completed. Marla emphasizes a subtle implication which is she has no testicles. In therapy groups she said to Jack that he has still his balls.

This is about castration complex. Girls, upon discovering the penis, become convinced that they have been victims of castration. The victims of testicular cancer become metaphors for victims of castration. These men have been punished and robbed of their manhood by the fathers and by the civilization that Fight Club criticizes. The subliminal flashed penis is also shown in a Disney movie that children watch. Again we see castration complex. During we see Tyler Durden as subliminal flashed imagery that has the same meaning with penis reminding castration complex to Jack. Because Tyler is the father of Jack.

And if the members of Fight Club declare the secret of Project Mayhem they will be castrated. Tyler explains how soap was created in the scene where “he” is giving

Jack a chemical burn. The burn portrayed in the movie is an example of the trauma one can feel when confronted with the real. Tyler states that, “the lye in soap was first discovered when water seeped through the ashes in bodies from human sacrifice. ” The fat creates a milky white discharge that has the ability to clean. The ashes, once used as the primordial ingredient of soap, is an exemplification of the Freudian concept of the death drive.

The lye is created from bodies returning to the inorganic matter that they once were. Not only is the soap a metaphor for the abject, the death drive, and the separation from the real, but it is also tied into the relationship with capitalism. Tyler sells the soap to department stores, thus undermining the system that has created the separation from the real that Jack has experienced. One of Tyler’s goals is to seek revenge on the capitalistic structures that leads to Jack’s separation from the real, so this selling of soap made from human-fat back to the most high-class department stores is an action of vindication.

Tyler’s goal of revenge leads to his turning the fight clubs into projects for capitalistic destruction. The soap is also paradoxical in that it is used on the body to clean it, but also separates one from the physical, by cleaning off the sweat or excess skin, etc. After a person uses soap, he does not smell himself, nor feel the dirt on his body; therefore, it is separating him from the materiality of his humanity, which is the real. The cave in the movie represenst

phallic phage. Jack’s power animal is penguin and it is a kind of bird that can not fly so it is a castrated animal.

Cave is the women sexual power representation that Jack has to accept. Cave is uterus. As Freud said; civilization doesn’t let us to live with our instinct, pressure sexual and aggressive instincts and make them deification. According to Freud primitive person is happier. The deification instincts provides material satisfaction instead of psychological satisfaction so needs of hands doesn’t end. According to Fromm; fascism, capitalism, socialism and communism are unsuccessful interference that are built up as a solution to human’s contradiction. Because human is in a conflict between choosing freedom or addiction.

In marketing world human is alone and important so Fromm thinks that human uses his power in a wrong way while trying to make his life meaningful. As a result of this fact human develops neurotic defenses and becomes far from his own self ego. We see this fact in scene of toilet. When Jack empty his inside, he order some furniture from IKEA insert. The dramatic tension of this film is tension between civilization and citizen, self and ideal, or Marla and Tyler. Fight Club complements Freud’s critique of civilization and becomes a critique of consumerism.

Despite all of the external aggression, Fight Club may only internalize the aggressive instinct and the self becomes the target. Fight Club revitalizes the libido that civilization has diminished but the attempt is destined to failure. Thus all of the narrator’s problems are solved and Tyler Durden may be the only agent to have caused the solution. The narrator is

liberated from his fixation in the Freudian phallic stage by committing patricide and claiming his mother. Tyler experiences voluntarily death only after his work is finished. Jack is liberated from his phallic fixation killing Tyler and come together with his mother figure, Marla.