Fight club analysis

“First, you have to know, not fear, know that some day, you’re gonna die.”

MASTER THESIS: Otherness in disillusionment depicted in the film “Fight club” by David Fincher

by YRP

The question is not what belief is more pleasing or comfortable or more advantageous to life, but of what may approximate more closely to the puzzling reality that lies outside us. (letter from Freud to Pfister 1930, p. 133)

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NEW BULGARIAN UNIVERSITY DEPARTMENT OF COGNITIVE SCIENCE AND PSYCHOLOGY Sofia, 2015

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Table of Contents Summary ................................................................................................................................... 4 Introduction .............................................................................................................................. 4 Theoretical reasoning ............................................................................................................... 6 1. Cinema and Psychoanalysis ............................................................................................ 6 2. Classical theory and object relation theory ..................................................................... 8 3. Disillusion(ment) ........................................................................................................... 10 3.1 Macmurray, Fairbairn and Suttie................................................................................... 10 3.2 Macmurray on disillusionment...................................................................................... 11 3.3 Personal relation theory on the reason behind splitting ..................................................... 13 3.4 Winnicott- Illusion, disillusion and otherness .................................................................... 13 4. Otherness ....................................................................................................................... 15 4.1 The double .......................................................................................................................... 15 4.1.1 Fragmented ego/Superego/ Split-off parts/Narcissism................................................ 17 4.1.2 Illusion and external world .......................................................................................... 20 4.2 Unconsciousness and external others ................................................................................. 21 Film analysis: .......................................................................................................................... 25 1. Film synopsis................................................................................................................. 25 2. Psychoanalytic analysis on selected scenes. ................................................................. 27 2.1 Introduction: ....................................................................................................................... 27 2.2 Disillusionment .................................................................................................................. 27 2.3 Otherness ............................................................................................................................ 31 2.4 Disillusionment and otherness ........................................................................................... 34 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................... 39 Attachments ............................................................................................................................ 40 SCENE 1 & 2 ....................................................................................................................... 40 SCENE 3 .............................................................................................................................. 40 SCENE 4 .............................................................................................................................. 40 SCENE 5 .............................................................................................................................. 41 SCENE 6 .............................................................................................................................. 41 SCENE 7 .............................................................................................................................. 41 SCENE 8 .............................................................................................................................. 42 SCENE 9 .............................................................................................................................. 42 SCENE 10 ............................................................................................................................ 42 SCENE 11 ............................................................................................................................ 42 SCENE 12 ............................................................................................................................ 43 SCENE 13 ............................................................................................................................ 43 SCENE 14. ........................................................................................................................... 44 SCENE 15 ............................................................................................................................ 44 SCENE 16 ............................................................................................................................ 45 SCENE 17 ............................................................................................................................ 45 SCENE 18 ............................................................................................................................ 45 SCENE 19 ............................................................................................................................ 46 SCENE 20 ............................................................................................................................ 46 SCENE 21 ............................................................................................................................ 47 SCENE 22 ............................................................................................................................ 47 SCENE 23 ............................................................................................................................ 48 References ............................................................................................................................... 50 3

Summary In the present work the film material is regarded as dipicting experiential and behavioral phenomena related to the concepts of disillusionment and otherness. I scrutinize the relation between the failure in accepting an independently existing external reality and unstable sense of identity resuling in a fragmented inner world in developing a sense of otherness within. The relationships of the main character are explored in a complex network of inner object relationship and phantasies. Marla is seen as a representation of character’s earliest relationship with the mother and their interaction is examined as an example of a failure in the infant mind’s gradual transition to reality and a realistic view of one’s own power. Talyer appears a personification of the split-off repressed parts, the internal structure of the super-ego and the unconscious in relation to the consciously experienced me. The encounter between Jack and Tayler is investigated as an example of the operation of primary mechanism as splitting and projective-identification.

Introduction The present study explores the foreign components of our psyche stored in our unconsciousness and revived in attempts to apprehend the “puzzling reality that lies outside us”.

This thesis aims at examining from the psychoanalytic perspective the sense of otherness and the process of disillusionment. Disillusionment is a concept developed within the British Object Relations thinking: it implies the child mind`s gradual transition to reality, facilitated by the mother, that results in a stable sense of identity and a realistic view of one`s own power. The research will examine the negative response, due to the continued existence of fear, to the mother’s attempts to disillusion the child. I investigate the effects for the internal dynamics from the failure in accepting the reality prohibitions. The unaccomplished escape from illusions is seen as a switch to a primitive state characterized by splitting, omnipotence of thought, a punitive Superego, an impaired reality testing and to experiencing the radical otherness of our unconscious. The uncanny double, the split-off bad parts, the punishing Superego, the unconscious are described as a ‘foreign presence’ that exists in the 4

relationship with the self. This otherness is seen in the frameworks of both the classical Freudian theory and the Object Relation theory.

The film depicts the encounter and confrontation with a sense of radical otherness within. The reasons for a withdrawal into the inner world (to live within one’s own imagination) are traced back to the refusal give up phantasies to accept an independently existing reality and limitations (inner and outer).

By means of cinematography we are able to “have a walk” in the inner psychic world of a person and see what he sees. I expect that my exploration of psychic processes, phenomena and conflicts will result in introducing various thoughts and raising questions about the otherness within, the illusions and the lack of coherence. I hope that I will be able to once again illustrate the usefulness of using psychoanalytic concepts to understand a creative act - a motion picture.

The thesis is based on psychoanalytically informed investigation of the inner world of the main character in the film “Fight Club”. The unaccomplished escape from illusions is seen in the basis of developing a sense of otherness. This ‘foreign presence’ is described in the conceptual work on the uncanny double, the split-off bad parts, the punishing Superego, the unconscious. I expect to conduct a study that illustrates the importance of film art in analyzing and visibly portraying psychoanalytic concepts and theories.

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Theoretical reasoning 1. Cinema and Psychoanalysis “The uniqueness of cinematography in visibly portraying psychological events calls our attention, with exaggerated clarity, to the fact that the interesting and meaningful problems of man’s relation to himself - and the fateful disturbance of this relation - finds here an imaginative representation” (Otto Rank, 1914). Films make emotional experiences and relations look intense and real, whereas when things happen to you in real life, the ostensibly understanding of one’s own emotional states and behaviors vanishes. Cinema allows furtherer investigation of character’s inner world in moving pictures. Complex networks of fantasy and experiences are represented through the careering of cinematic images and sounds. As Michael Brearley puts it in an article from October, 2009 for The Guardian: “Film can offer an enlightening and sometimes disturbing insight into troublesome or dangerous emotional states – and film directors have been engaged by the richness of their characters' inner lives as psychoanalysts have by their patients” (Brearley, M., 29.10.2009, “So, tell me about your direction”).

Andrea Sabbadini cites Glen Gabbard (1977) on the elusive correspondence there is among filmmaking and psychoanalytic work:“to a large extent, film speaks the language of the unconscious” (Sabadini, 2010).

In his work “Stanley Kubrick’s Dreams Machine: Psychoanalysis, Films and history”, Geoffrey Cocks lists certan important characteristcs that psychoanalysis and film share, apart from the coincidence of their birth and their intercourse with dreams. “Both are artifacts of the scientific and industrial age. Both are concerned with what the mind sees. Both treat time as highly malleable and the unconscious as timeless. Both are concerned with tangible reality— psychological and photographic—but both are also vitally concerned with the intangible.”. A major compatibility for psychoanalysis when applied to film he sees in its understanding of ambivalence, in the dialogical nature and the ambiguity of symbols in dreams it analyzes.

(Cocks, 2003, p.35)

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My choice of the critically acclaimed film “Fight club” as a representational media for the psychoanalytic study conducted is based on a strong believe in the creative power of art that allow us to gain a better understanding of our emotional reactions and experiences. In man’s notion of oneself, piled up with conscious memories, one usually takes into consideration the logic circumstances memorized that lead them to be the person they appear to be. Art, as psychoanalysis, questions the unconscious depths of our selves and illuminates other stories for the origins of our (psychic) development. The present study is an attempt to illustrate the importance of film art in analyzing and visibly portraying psychoanalytic concepts and theories.

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2. Classical theory and object relation theory Freud (1926) conceptualized anxiety as an inherent reaction to danger that after birth is directed to the object world, the mother or a caregiver. Drives produce an enternal disturbance that requires release through discharge or satisfaction. Due to a probability for discharging or satisfaction to bring earlier “traumatic state”, anxiety is experienced as fear of the object/mother/ loss, or fear of the loss of the object’s/mother’s love.

In Freud’s theory drives are directed toward object to release energy. They cathect these objects. Drive and object are not bond together, the object should be found. Later he introduces his theory on narcissism and establishes a primary narcissism as the original libido directing its energy into the ego. This primary ego-libido becomes overly stimulated which causes displeasure. The displeasure then propels the energy to direct outwards onto an external object. The libido is then defined as an “object-libido.” (Atanassov, 2009; Paul Homes, 1992).

In Freud's notion of the formation of subjectivity, the infantile ego is a divided entity.

The ego refers to the child's sense of self; however, because the child, in its narcissistic phase, also takes itself, invests in itself, as the object of its own libidinal drives, the ego is both subject and object. The narcissistic ego is formed in its relationship to others. (Freud, 1933) Object relations theory is developed by certain of Freud’s successors: in Britain by Melanie Klein, W.R.D. Fairbairn, D.W. Winnicott, Harry Guntrip and John Bowlby, and in the United States by psychoanlysts such as Otto Kernberg. The psyche and the personality are seen as being, in part, a result of the relationships made with people in the external world, which are rememebered or internalized, as “object relationships” in the mind. The creation of this inner world could be studied as it develops in childhood, or in the analytic consulting room or in art.

Internal object is a concept that occupies central place in theoretical framework of British and American thinker. In contrast to Freud's super-ego concept, Klein suggests that phantasies of internal presences begin in the first months of life. Objects are inherent in, and thereby created out of the drives themselves, independent of the real others in the external world., “… the child’s earliest’s earliest reality is wholely phantastic.” (Klein, 1930, p.238) A complex set of internalized object relations is established, and phantasies and anxieties concerning the state of one’s internal object world, become the underlying basis for 8

one’s behavior, moods, and sense of self. Klein conceives of the drives as more tightly bound to objects, both internal and external, than did Freud, and hence she rejected the notion of "primary narcissism." She argued that Freud’s “narcisstic libido” reflects not a cathexis of the ego itself, but of internal objects, and thus replaced Freud's distinction between narcissistic libido and object libido with the distinction between relations to internal vs. relations to external objects. (Homes, 1992; Atanassov, 2009) Melanie Klein describes the inner world of the infant as consisting of inner objects kept apart from each other. This situation is a result of a splitting process in the psyche associated with the mechanism of projection and the phase of early development she calls the “paranoid-schizoid position”. In this early phase of life the immature ego must defend against the anxieties that could not be tolerated if an attempt were made to integrate “good” and “bad” internal objects. Klein believed that: “the ego is incapable of splitting the objectinternal and external- without a corresponding splitting taking place whithin the ego… [these] processes …. are of course bound up with the infant’s phantasy life; and the anxieties which stimulates the mechanisms of splitting are also of a phantastic nature. It is in phantasy that the infant splits the object and the self, but the effect of this phantasy is a very real one, because it leads to feelings and relations (and later on, thought-process) being in fact cut off from one another.” (‘Notes on some schizoid mechanisms’, Klein 1946 and 1975:6) In contrast, whereas Klein's thinking begins in the internal world of the infant, Fairbairn begins with the real relationship between the infant and its mother. He believed that it is: “the experience of libidinal deprivation and frustration that originally calls forth the infant's aggression towards his libidinal object (e.g. mother) and so gives rise to ambivalence.

To ameliorate this intolerable situation, (the infant) splits the figure of his mother into two objects - a satisfying (‘good’) object and an unsatisfying (‘bad’) object; and, with a view to controlling the unsatisfying object, he employs the defensive process of internalization to remove it from outer reality, where it eludes his control, to the sphere of inner reality, where it offers prospects of being more amenable to control in the role of internal object.” (Fairbairn 1951; MacKenna, 2007, p.253) The internalized object/mother continues to be unsatisfying, yet passionately desired.

The reason why in Fairbairn’s view all object relationships involve ego structute, the resulting conflict brings a double split whithin the central ego, so that there is what Fairbairn calls ‘internal sabouteur’, an amalgam between anti-libidinal ego and rejecting object, and a libidinal ego entwined with the exciting object (Fairbairn 1951; MacKenna, 2007).

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3. Disillusion(ment) The child is born within illusions that could be seen as shields for the evolving psyche.

These are the illusions of completeness, omnipotence, omniscience, immortality. In the development of the internal dynamics of the infant a transition between relationships on the basis of ilusions to such where the othereness of the other/mother/ is apprehended is not so smoothly established. An ability to be in contact with reality and mark off illusions from reality is gradually formed.

Susan Long wrtes in her review on the book “Disillusionment: From the Forbidden Fruit to the Promised Land”: “We are early presented with an image of the ‘breathe inbreathe out’ movement of illusionment and disillusionment; their interplay and interdependence, both vital to life. They [the authors] posit the hypothesis that we are created by illusions and that throughout life we must work our way through these illusions, become disillusioned, and learn to face ‘here-and-now’ reality”.

In this part of the thesis I will elucidate on a concept of “disillusionment” developed within the strands of thinking of the British Object Relationship.

3.1 Macmurray, Fairbairn and Suttie The Scottish psychiatrist Ian D. Suttie provides a link between his contemporaries Macmurray and Fairbairn.

“Macmurray… defends a thick concept of the self as embedded in interpersonal relations: “The Self is constituted by its relations to the Other – “it has its being in its relationships” (Macmurray 1998, p.17). This dependence upon others appears most forcefully in the relationship of the child to the mother… Such dependence “the mother-child relation” represents “the basic form of human existence”, that is “a ‘You and I’ with a common life” (Macmurray 1998, p.60)…. It is inherently communal.” (Clarke, 2005, p. 215) This is a view common to all of them, Fairbairn, Suttie and Sutherland. The overriding importance of the success of the earliest of the relationships is stressed by Suttie, Fairbairn, Macmurray and Sutherland, and they all accept the foundational nature of that relationship. It is the failure in the early relationship that lies at the heart of all psychopathology.

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Macmurray explicitly acknowledges Suttie’s influence on him, while Sutherland stresses that Fairbairn’s later thinking is influenced by Suttie. The idea of disillusion is originally discusses by Suttie (1935) and subsequently developed by Macmurray (1961) and Winnicott (1953).

On Suttie’s account from 1935 of the possible responses that the child might make to disillusion, he writes: “Automatically … the child's frustrated social love turns to anxiety … and then to hate if the frustration is sufficiently severe. But hate of a loved object (ambivalence) … is intolerable; the love relationship must be preserved as a matter of life or death, and there are various means of doing this. First it may be done by the preservation of the lovability of the first loved object—the mother. … An alternative is to abandon the mother, as she now appears in reality, for the mother as she once appeared and as she is remembered. This involves the technique of taking refuge from reality in phantasy… the child may seek a “good” substitute for the “bad” mother in the nurse or in the father; but towards this substitute the same demands will be put forward and the same struggle renewed. … to the progressive transference of dependency to others than the mother, the normal person owes much of his success. A fourth alternative is found in the Adlerian technique of power (or in possession) [which involves aggression, coercion, anger, and love-protests on the part of the child.]” (Clarke, 2005, p. 215).

3.2 Macmurray on disillusionment Macmurray’s development of Suttie’s original approach to the consequences of disillusion for the internal dynamics of the child are more consistent with Fairbairn’s uderstanding of endopsychic structure. Macmurray brings out that there are three distinct ways of responding to a mother’s attempts to disillusion the child, that is, gradually introduce them to reality and a realistic view of their own powers. “The first possibility is to return to a loving trusting relationship with mother, understanding that she let the infants struggle for their own good, and it is this option in which the good object might be most strongly developed and internalized. The second is to treat the mother and others as essentially bad and out to frustrate or deny the infant, and for the infant to therefore adopt an agonistic approach to others and the world, and to try to take whatever it wants rather than cooperate and work communally with and within it. The third is for the infant to withdraw from the outside world and live in the inner world of imagination rather than work communally with others to achieve its ends.“ (Clarke, G. (2012), p. 216–217) 11

Fairbairn and Macmurray are both concerned with the consequences of failures in the earliest relationship. At some point, the relationship becomes unsatisfactory to some degree.

For Fairbairn, this is the point at which the basic endopsychic structure is formed in order to be able to sustain the necessary relationship with mother. When Macmurray treats this process he speaks of a phenomenon that he may have encountered in Winnicott, the process of disillusionment, the refusal of the mother to continue doing things that she judges the child is now ready and able to do for itself.

Macmurray suggests one positive and two negative possible outcomes to any attempted disillusionment characterised by the dominance of one or other of two motives: love and fear. Macmurray derives these basic motivations from Suttie. For Suttie and Macmurray, fear produces aggression and hatred as a response to having love threatened or withdrawn.

In his analysis on Suttie, Fairbairn, Macmurray and Sutherland, Graham Clarke suggests there is simalirity between Macmurray’s account of the negative response to disillusionment, based upon the continued existence of fear and the development of Fairbairn’s subsidiary libidinal and antilibidinal selves. The responses are characterised by Macmurray as being “good” or over-compliant and as “bad”, or aggressive and rebellious: “Both types of attitude- submissive and aggressive – are negative, and therefore involve unreality. They carry over the illusion of the negative phase phase of withdrawal into the return to active relationship. They motivate a behavior in relationship which is contradictory and therefore self defeating. For the inherent objective of the reality of the relationship – is the full mutuality of fellowship in a common life, the only way in which the individual can realise himself in person. But both the dispositions are egocentric, and motivate action that is for the sake of oneself, and not for the sake of the Other, which is therefore selfinterested. Such action is implicitly a refusal of mutuality, and an effort to constrain the other to do what we want. By conforming submissively to his wishes we put him under an obligation to care for us. In both cases we are cheating: If it succeeds in its intention it produces the appearance of mutuality, but not the reality. It can produce, at most a reciprocity of co-operation which stimulates, even it excludes, the personal unity which it seeks to achive.” (Clarke, 2005, p. 216, quoting Macmurray 1961/1998.)

Achieving a mature dependence means achieving a real relation to others and a clear view toward things, orientated towards reality. The subsidiary selves Fairbairn is describing “opereate exacty like these negative motivations based upon past object relations and prevent 12

our acting realistically or really sharing our world”. (Scharff, J. S. and Scharff, D. E., Clarke, 2005, p.217)

3.3 Personal relation theory on the reason behind splitting The personal relations theory, proposed by Graham Clarke is based upon the work of Scotish thinkers, Sutties, Fairbairn and Macmurray, and takes account of the recent work on human development and infant research conducted by Sutherland and Trevarthen. It recognizes that “we are active, reality orientated, personal social beings from the start, instinctively geared to suckling and to forming and sustaining relationships”. The theory argues that we can only develop to our fullest if “we are part of a joyful and loving dyad in our earliest relationship”. It asserts that “our overall motivations are love and fear and that it is fear that generates splitting and repression whitin inner reality”. (Scharff, J. S. and Scharff, D. E., Clarke, 2005, p.218)

3.4 Winnicott- Illusion, disillusion and otherness Previously psychoanalysis had followed Freud in seeing illusion as a failure to adapt to reality. Later, Milner and Winnicott came to view it positively as a means of adaptation. In Winnicott’s account the self from its very beginning is relational. And at the basis of all relationship is illusion. The baby cries and, if all goes well, the breast appears. As a result of the “bounty” of the external world, the infant experience the bounty of its own capacity to create. However, some of that primitive omnipotence nevertheless survives “in men’s faith in the power of the human mind, which grapples with the laws of reality“ (Freud, 1913, Turner, J.F.,2002, p.1072).

In a “Brief History of Illusion: Milner, Winnicott and Rycroft”, John Turner summarizes that, for the infant not in the grip of defensive fantasy, there remains room within the experience of omnipotence to apprehend the otherness of the mother's presence. The illusion of omnipotence nurtures in infant a faith in the value of what it may bring forth out of its inner world; and its gradual apprehension of the mother's otherness fosters a trust in the outer world as a safe and interesting place in which to exercise that creative power. In Winnicotts view it is the beginning of a the long process of disillusion, as the breast is 13

withheld more or less in line with the baby's capacity to wait. The child is ushered into the otherness of the outer world, where the mother, is only ordinarily good enough in her provision and not magically perfect.

Devepoment of the ability to sustain object relationships means transition between relationships on the basis of illusions to such where the otherness of the mother is apprehended. This determines the ability to be in contact with reality and mark off illusions from reality. The establishment of personality is a transition between illusion of omnipotence where the world is created and controlled by the infallibility of the infant’s power and realization of the mother as separate and limitations of the infant’s potence.

The transition from illusory omnipotence to realistic potency is negotiated through the experience of playing in a transitional space (Winnicott, 1971). A transitional space can be recreated throughout life, but initially it depends on mother adapting sufficiently to her infant so that the infant is able to benefit from the illusion of being in control of what is going on. If the weaning process is either too abrupt, or too prolonged, the infant experiences this as being pushed out of context and the result could be shame and a switch to psychotic process. In “Working with the Dynamics of Shame and Violence” Johnatan Asser agues that Winnicott's ‘good-enough mothering’ is actually attuned to the baby's shame in that she instinctively knows at what pace to disillusion the baby regarding her Otherness from him, allowing him to come to terms with his dependence in a way that the shame of being so in need, so helpless, can be tolerated. He continues that adequately handled Otherness, with the right amount of adaptation and disillusionment, promotes thinking. Inadequately handled Otherness promotes shame and a switch to psychotic functioning. (J. Asser, 2004, p.95, 96)

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4. Otherness The authors David Gutman, F. Van Der Rest, Ternier-David, J. Verrier and J. Millat, delineate three major illusions of omnipotence, immortality, and omniscience. Each illusion is seen as a necessary protector of the developing psyche. The infant is created within the illusion of omnipotence until they are disillusioned through the experience of not having the power to control mother completely. The child has a further illusion of immortality that is challenged by the realisation of mortality and death, especially the realisation that parents are not immortal. The illusion of omniscience turns into the disillusionment consequent upon apprehending the limitation of knowledge. The adolescent learns that the father is not allknowing. In the model presented by the authors, these three major illusions stem from the first illusion - that of completeness. This is the illusion sustaining the belief in the possibility of wholeness or perfection. It underlies the unconscious yearning for a return to the oneness with mother or the hope of finding the ‘other’ who will make us complete. (“Disillusionment: From the Forbidden Fruit to the Promised Land”, Susan Long, 2006) Based upon theories of Freud, Winnicott, and Lacan, the authors stress that only in moving from the illusion of completeness through the recognition that we are not complete or whole, that is, that we lack, can we come to desire. Escape from illusion, through disillusion, is seen as coming into freedom. (Long, 2006) The unaccomplished escape from illusions is seen as experiencing the radical otherness of our unconscious in a switch to a primitive state characterized by impaired reality testing, splitting and projective identification. The uncanny double, the split-off bad parts, the punishing Superego, the unconscious are described as a foreign presence, a distortion of a person's perception of reality due to the effects of wishes and fears.

4.1 The double One of the earliest works influenced by Freud's theory of the double was Otto's Rank's classic ‘The Double’ which was directly influenced by a famous movie, The Student of Prague (Germany, 1913). In his later rewriting of Freud, Lacan took Freud's notion of the divided self as the basis of his theory of the formation of subjectivity in the mirror phase.

Freud builds antithesis between the coherent ego and the repressed which is split off from it, 15

based on his insight into the structural conditions of the mind. His idea of a divided or fragmented self signifies the self as split between multiple investments and various identifications that has not yet been synthesized due to the existence of unintegrated representations (Freud, 1923). One part of the divided ego is directed inward relating to the instincts and cathexises, and the other is directed outwards relating to the external world of the objects.

Freud introduces the phenomenon of the double with which all themes of uncanniness are concerned and develops his thoughts of the uncanny in the literature in an essay published in 1919. He writes that it is nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar and oldestablished in the mind which has become alienated from it through the process of repression.

Otto Rank, who wrote most extensively on the motif of ‘The double’ in 1914, suggests that one of the basic ideas of the double is that it is ‘the person's past that inescapably clings to him and becomes his fate as soon as he tries to escape it’.

In the ‘The uncanny’ Freud continued the dialogue with Rank's essay, discussing the uncanny nature of the concept of Rank’s concept of the double and reminding Rank’s evolution on the idea, the double that was originally an insurance against the destruction of the ego, an ‘energetic denial of the power of death’. In accordance with Rank, Freud argues that the double can also be viewed as a manifestation of ‘unbounded self-love’ dating back to the early stage of primary narcissism. “When this stage has been surmounted, the double reverses its aspect. From having been an assurance of immortality, it becomes the uncanny harbinger of death“ (Freud, 1919, p. 235).

In the essay Freuds investigates a particular province of the subject of literature that is “the uncanny”. The word “unheimlich” in German is not used in a clearly defined sense. It is realted to what is frightening, to what arouses dread and horror, what excites fear in general.

The base word “Heimlich” is also ambiguous because among it different shades of meaning it coincides with its exact opposite- “Unheimlich”. Thus, on the one hand “Heimlich” comes to be “Unheimlich” and on the other it refers to the opposite of “Unheimlich”- belonging to the house, not strange, familiar, tame, and intimate. (Freud, 1919).

Freud examines a number of examples in literature and mythic stories that use the figure of the double, the shadow. Jeanne Bernstein summarizes it all as a means of personifying the bad or threatening part of one's own self that the good, internal parts of the self has projected outside. She continues that in many mythic stories the bad, doubled part never stops haunting the good one, and eventually challenges it to a duel where one part 16

usually kills the other and realises in the very last moment that he has killed himself.

“Whether, the uncanny double is represented as an independent and visible cleavage of the ego … or as a real and physical person of unusual external similarity … the impulse to rid oneself of the uncanny opponent in a violent manner belongs to the essential features of the [double] motif (Otto Rank, pp. 12, 16-17)”. (Freud, 1919; Bernstein, 2002, p.1192).

Freud broadened the idea of the ‘double’ beyond the passing of primary narcissism allowing the possibility for it to receive fresh meaning from the later stages of the ego's development. “The fact that an agency of this kind exists, which is able to treat the rest of the ego like an object—the fact, that is, that man is capable of self-observation—renders it possible to invest the old idea of a ‘double’ with a new meaning and to ascribe a number of things to it—above all, those things which seem to self-criticism to belong to the old surmounted narcissism of earliest times” (Freud,1919, 235p.). In contrast, in Kleinian thinking, the idea of primary narcissism is obselete. From the very beginning the infant recognizes their experiences as a result from object interaction.

4.1.1 Fragmented ego/Superego/ Split-off parts/Narcissism In this paper I use a work of art- the film “Fight Club” to illustrate and explore experiences of the emergence of something different and alien within the self. I am examing the character’s oscillation between a sense of difference and an attempt to build a sense of coherent identity. In this line of thoughts, the study moves further in investigating the otherness within the theoretical framework of the constitution of the superego (both in Freudian and Kleinan thinking), the primary defense mechanisms of splitting and projective identification and the effect of the split-off parts on the ego development.

The formation of the Super-ego is examined closely in “The Ego and the Id”, a pivotal work in Freud’s theoretical thoughts. In the discussion on The Ego and Super Ego (EgoIdeal), Freud elaborates and attempts to clarify the understanding of the dynamic relations within the mind. “Whereas the ego is essentially the representative of the external world [to the id], of reality, the super-ego stands in contrast to it as the representative of the internal world, of the id. Conflicts between the ego and the ideal will … ultimately reflect the contrast between what is real and what is psychical, between the external world and the internal world” (Freud, 1923, p. 36). The ego forms its super-ego out of the id. “The way in which the super-ego came into being explains how it is that the early conflicts of the ego with the objectcathexes of the id can be continued in conflicts with their heir, the super-ego” (Freud, 1923, p.

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39). Freud explains that the energic cathexis springing from the id will come into operation in the reaction-formation of the ego-ideal, if the ego has not succeded in properly mastering the Oedipus complex. “The abundant communication between the ideal and these Ucs. instinctual impulses solves the puzzle of how it is that the ideal itself can to a great extent remain unconscious and inaccessible to the ego …” (Freud, 1923, p. 39).

Melanie Klein extended and developed Sigmund Freud’s understanding of the unconscious mind and the internal structure of superego. She explored the uncharted territory of the mind of the infant, finding an early Oedipus complex and the earliest roots of the superego. In her thinking the superego is composed of a split-off part of the ego into which is projected death instinct fused with life instinct and good and bad aspects of the primary and also later objects. It acquires both protective and threatening qualities. The superego and the ego share different aspects of the same objects and develop in parallel through the process of introjection and projection. If the circumstances are favaourable the internal objects in both ego and superego, which are initially extreme, become less so and the two structures become increasingly reconciled.

In “Ego and the Id” Freud stresses that the ego is derived from bodily sensations and in early stages of its development the mind remains closely linked to the bodily functioning.

A person’s own body is a factor that plays a part in bringing about the the formation of the ego and its differentiation from the id. “Its surface, is a place from which both external and internal perceptions may spring”. To the touch the body yields “two kinds of sensations, one of which may be equivalent to an internal perception”. Freud also write about the perception of pain and compares the way by whick we arrive at the idea of our body with the way in which we gain new knowledge of our organs during a painful illness. (Freud, 1923, p.25,26).

The maternal function is important in terms of containg and organizing the baby’s earliest sensations. The idea of corporeity is central to Klein’s account of early development through her “emphasizing the structuring impact of the relationship to the maternal breast, and to her body more broadly”. Klein emphasized on constitutional factors, closely linking somatic experience with the first psychic experiences, and hence as the basis for early unconscious phantasies and somatic memories (Lema, 2015, p.10).

In a dicsussion on Klein’s technique Segal builds a connection between phantasies and the ego and super-ego structures on the ground that the mechanisms of projection and introjection are being based on primitive phantasies of incorporation and ejection. She extends her view that the structure of personality is affected by the phantasies of objects which are 18

being introjected into the ego, as well as the loss to the ego by phantasies of projective identification. Freud describes the super-ego as an internal object in active relationship with the id and the ego. This structure within the ego is the end result of complex phantasies. Later Melani Klein shows that other objects, earlier than the superego described by Freud, are similarly introjected and a complex internal world is being built and structuralized. (Segal 1981) In the paranoid-schizoid position, established by Klein and attributed to the oral phase, the infant has no concept of a whole person. He is related to part objects, primarily the breast and experiences no ambivalence. His object is split into an ideal and a preseutory one, and the prevalent anxiety of that stage is of a persecutory nature, the fear that the presecutors may invade and destroy the ideal object. Splitting, introjection, projection are very active mechanism of defense. Projective-identification is another important mechanism of that phase and it illustrates the connection between instincts, phantasies and mechanisms of defense. It is an expression of instincts in that both libidinal and aggressive desires are felt to be omnipotently satisfied by the phantasy. It is also a mechanism of defense in the same way in which the projection is- it rids the self of unwanted parts.

Lynne Layton sees as central to the narcissistic personality disorder a fragility of self structure that results in an oscillation between grandiosity and self-deprecation, and between devaluation and idealization of the other, between longings to merge and isolating defenses against merger. Her psychoanalytic understanding on narcissism is based on ideas from Kohut (1971, 1977) and Fairbairn’s (1954) and Kernberg (1975). The state shift to self-deprecation, devaluation and isolation is set off by a “slight” to the fragile self whose needs for recognition, connection and care have consistently not been met. These slights evoke what Kohut called “narcissistic rage, a punitive, annihilating anger that issues from an archaic harsh and punishing superego”. Kernberg’s (1975) perspective on narcissism, based on Kleinian theoretical thinking, adds to an emphasis on the primary defense mechanisms of narcissism: splitting and projective identification. In his explanation of etiology, Kernberg highlights a failure to integrate good and bad representations, self-states, and affects, “a failure caused either by traumatic treatment by the environment or by an excessive amount of constitutional aggression”. Because of this difficulty integrating good and bad, that is, the difficulty achieving a somewhat stable depressive position, in Klein’s (1946) terms. The use of defenses such as splitting and projective identification produces the oscillation between polarized states, and an inability to tolerate ambivalence and ambiguity. [Layton, L. (2011), p.113] .

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4.1.2 Illusion and external world Along the lines considering the manifest motivation of the figure of a double, Freud adds that the double may also embody, “all the unfulfilled but possible futures to which we still like to cling in phantasy, all the strivings of the ego which adverse external circumstances have crushed, and all our suppressed acts of volition which nourish in us the illusion of free will” (Freud, 1919, p. 236) Searching for an explanation for the feeling of uncanny that pervades the conception of the double, Freud comes to the conclusion that it is a creation dating back to a very early mental stage. He speaks of a regression to a time when the ego had not yet marked itself off sharply from the external world and from other people.

Freud explains some experiences of uncanniness in terms of a temporary and partial regression to a universal early developmental stage—the omnipotence of thought. He speaks of the animistic conception of the universe, characterized by the belief in omnipotence of thought, magical powers, and all other creations with the help of which “man, in the unrestricted narcissism of that stage of development, strove to fend off the manifest prohibitions of reality” (Freud, 1919, p. 240). From passing through this phase certain residues and traces have been preserved that are capable of manifesting themselves.

Freud considers the uncanny effect of the double as an affair of ‘reality-testing’, a question of the material reality of the phenomena. What had been repressed is the belief in its (material) reality. An uncanny effect is produced when the distinction between imagination and reality is effaced, as when something that we have hitherto regarded as imaginary appears before us in reality. The infantile element Freud finds in this is a feature closely allied to the belief in the omnipotence of thoughts- the over-accentuation of psychical reality in comparison with material reality. (Freud, 1919) He acknowledges the fact the primitive beliefs are based on and connected with the infantile complexes and draws a destinctions, nevertheless a hazy one, that “an uncanny experience occurs either when infantile complexes which have been repressed are once more revived by some impression, or when primitive beliefs which have been surmounted seem once more to be confirmed” (Freud, 1919, p.249).

Freud’s explanations of uncanny experiences and the oceanic experience are based on hypothetical reconstructions of infant mental life. He assumes these phenomena are examples of the distortion of a person's perception of reality due to the effects of wishes and fears. The 20

mind is aiming to restore an early state- a sense of narcissistic and omnipotent unity with the environment. In her article “Psychoanalysis and the Uncanny: Take Two or When Disillusionment Turns Out to Be an Illusion” Tiina Allik reminds that this state in Freud’s thought is itself an illusion and also the memory of an illusion. Freud didn’t believed that human beings have the kind of connectedness with their environment or their caregivers that would give them inexplicable kinds of knowledge. (Allik, 2003) Throughout the development of psychoanalytic thought such a view, that the child is completely separated from the environment, is not supported by many.

Freud enlightens more on the “general tendency of mankind to credulity and a belief in the miraculous” (Freud, 1933, p.33). Human beings crave to find evidence confirming that one's wishes are in fact true the reason why it affirms “surmounted modes of thought” that are based in the illusory sense of omnipotence that we all experience in infancy and childhood (Freud, 1919). Tiina Allik suggest that as a corollary from this craving, human beings are hostile to the demands of reality testing, the monotonous work that is the foundation for the exercise of reason.

4.2 Unconsciousness and external others Freud regarded the sense of the unitariness of the ego as illusory because of the unconscious aspects that permeate the consciousness. Knowing something about one’s unconsciousness is seen in the realm of uncanny phenomena. Those unconscious processes of the mind appear as impulses which seem like “those of a stranger” and the effects of the unconscious strike us as uncanny. Thoughts emerge suddenly without one's knowing where they come from, nor can one do anything to drive them away. These alien guests even seem to be more powerful than those which are at the ego's command. Tiina Allik describes the unconscious as being itself an “other” that is not within the scope of the awareness and the control of the conscious self. “The unconscious persists as an alien other in the mind, and its effects cannot be ever completely domesticated”. (Freud, 1917, Allik, 2003,p.27,).

Using theoretical concepts derived from Freud, Klein and Bion, Lee Rather develops the idea of an internal object relationship, ‘the collaboration with the unconscious other’, which forms the basis for both creative thinking and the psychoanalytic function of the

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personality. In his work the term ‘unconscious other’ is meant to signify the subjective experience of a foreign presence within oneself from which both spontaneous creative inspiration and involuntary psychic phenomena are felt to emanate. The author focuses on the influence of paranoid-schizoid and depressive anxieties (Klein, 1930, 1940, 1946, 1957) on the way in which the unconscious other is experienced as an internal presence. (Rather, L., 2001).

Rather traces the unconscious other within the analysand's “subjective experience of a foreign presence, a strange ‘not me’ or ‘it’ that exists in relationship with the ‘me’, and from which various phenomena are felt to emanate” (Rather 2001, p. 515). He describes the process of psychoanalysis as development of a creative internal collaboration between the analysand and this unconscious other. Rather explains the role of psychoanalysis in assisting the intrapsychic couple to develop a dialogue. He cites Grotstein’s words: ‘arcane thinking couple’ or ‘internal dreaming couple’ who produce and comprehend the dream (Rather 2001, p. 516, Grotstein, 1981, 200).

The relationship Rather builds of the unconscious other to the concepts of the unconscious and of internal objects is build upon Freud, Freudian and Kleinian analysts.

Freud assumes that the character of the ego “is a precipitate of abandoned object-cathexes and that it contains the history of those object choices” (1923, p.29). Freudian analysts conceptualise the unconscious as consisting of libidinal and aggressive instinctual drives and repressed wishes. By contrast, Kleinian analysts postulate an unconscious consisting of internal objects and various identifications with them. Klein developed a theoretical corpus founded on the concepts of “unconscious phantasy, splitting, projection, introjection and the gradual accretion of an internal object world”. In classical theory, the sole internal object described by Freud is the superego. By contrast, Kleinian thought conceptualises a “pantheon of persecutory and helpful internal objects” interacting in complex ways. The individual experiences the inner world, consciously and unconsciously, as if the internal world were comprised of such objects (Rather, 2001, p.519).

Comparing Freud’s and Kohut’s conceptions on unconsciousness, Raher summarizes that to “speak of an object relationship with the unconscious other means to recognise that this internal presence is encountered through the prototypical anxieties stemming from internal objects” (Rather, 2001, p.520).

Rather’s analysis on the psychoanalytic and creative process is build on resemblance in terms of the necessity for intrapsychic collaboration. Rather suggests that the reason why 22

spontaneous analytic phenomena of the analysand are beyond control imbues them them with a quality of ‘otherness’ in relation to the consciously experienced ‘me’. “The analysand who begins to evolve an analytic state of mind has an experience of collaborating with an apparently independent unconscious other who offers up raw material to be worked with by the conscious deliberate part of the personality” (Rather, 2001, p.520).

The uncanniness of the uncounscious is carefully examined by Felman. He sees in Lacan’s return to Freud’s a return to a foreign language, to something that defies translation.

Allik cites Felman on that “insight is never purely cognitive… insight is always partially unconscious, partially partaking of a practice” (Allik, 2003, p. 29). The uncanniness of the unconscious is determined by the fact that the difference between the unconscious and the conscious is not simply opposition. We know about the unconscious by how it speaks through the conscious.

In her essay on the uncanny Tiina Allik aims to provide a plausible scientific explanation on the phenomena. She develops an argument that the otherness of our unconscious to our selves is analogous to the otherness of external others.

She continues that the unconscious is not simply outside of consciousness and the only way we know about the unconscious is by how it speaks through the conscious. By this means the unconcsiousness “subverts our notions of the coherence and integrity of consciousness and appears as uncanny” (Allik, T. 2003, p.28).

We understand ourselves through speaking and acting; and in both speaking and acting we become external to ourselves. The relationship of what is external and internal has been subverted. Allik concludes that as consciousness and the unconsciousness are neither simply outside nor inside each other, identical nor opposed, neither are subjects.

Allik refers to Felman’s writing on the new Freudean reflexitivity from 1987, that subjects are not entirely separated from each other “but rather interfering from within and in one another” (Allik, 2003, p.29). Giving examples from the psychoanalytic situation, where each partner’s participation in the unconscious of the other is examined, Allik states that the otherness of the unconscious is imbricated with the otherness of external others.

In the theoretical framework of the study I describe the transition from illusions to a state of disillusionment in the ideas of the Object Relation theory and the classical Freudian theory. I specifically explore the consequences of the failure in the process of disillusionment for the internal dynamics of the infant. In my notion of otherness within the self I address 23

such a distortion in person's perception of reality due to the effects of illusions, wishes and fears. The uncanny double, the split-off bad parts, the punishing superego, the unconscious are described as a foreign presence within the self. I will continue my work with an investigation of the otherness and refusal to accept independently existing reality in the realm of the unconscious phantasies of an inner world reflected in the feature film “Fight club�.

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Film analysis: In the subsequent section of the present work it will be conducted a psychoanalytic exploration of psychic processes, phenomena and conflicts in the inner world of the main character in the film “Fight club”. I will examine film’s dialogues and monologues, images and sounds as material that could be gathered by patient in psychoanalysis. I will explore the soryline as means of understanding the psychic constitution of character’s inner life.

1. Film synopsis.

The narrative structure of the film “Fight club” may seem obscure when seen for the first time. Only after coming to the film ending, the audience is capable of understanding the film trajectory, by means of restructuring and rethinking what the director David Fincher has chosen to show. Indeed, the final scene, in regard to the narrative, could be a provocation to relook at the film and relish watching a more coherent story.

In a gloomy opening scene we meet Jack (Edward Norton) with a gun barrel sucked into his mouth. During the next 2 hours the spectator puzzles out the events bringing to that particular beginning.

In other words “Fight club” is the story of a 30-something single man (Ed Norton) who is mildly critical of the modern consumer culture, women and meaningless job that define his life. He can’t sleep, and, in the first part of the film, he seeks relief from his insomnia by frequenting many self-help groups. During the entire action Jack’s thoughts appear in the sound of a narrator’s voice.

Jack meets Marla Singer’s (Helena Bonham Carter) at a support group for men with testicular cancer. Marla’s clothes and haircut are out of any specific historical era or fashion. She is cynical, enthralling, wears cocktail and maid-of-honor dresses bought for a dollar. Marla appears at every self-group Jack is visiting. He is accusing that her presence at the same groups ruins this solution for him.

After Jack‘s apartment mysteriously blows up, destroying all his possessions, he goes to live with Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), a soap manufacturer and explosives specialist he sat next to on a plane during a business trip. Tayler wears sunglasses, Elvis’s style, red leather jacket and tight mesh tank tops with comics’ cartoons.

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He and Tyler start Fight club, a weekly meeting where half-naked men gather to beat each other up. Men are drawn to Fight club and Fight clubs begin to proliferate all over the country. Tyler develops various homework assignments designed to turn the members of fight club into an anti-conformist corps of revolutionaries dedicated to the destruction of consumer capitalism and the remasculinization of men. Simultaneously, after a suicidal call for help from Marla to Jack, Tyler begins to have sex with Marla Singer. The narrator is getting more and more irritated and is trying to ignore Marla’s presence.

Fight club proceeds into Project Mayhem, Tyler’s plan to blow up consumer debt institutions. Tayler’s disappearance sets off a hasty chase around the country where Jack is trying to find Tayler. Another phone call to Marla is the trigger for the film’s key revelationsimultaneously Jack and the audience discover that he and Tayler are, in fact, the same person.

As the narrator comes to realize that he himself is the authoritarian leader with radically anti-conformity philosophy, Jack intervenes to stop Project Mayhem from going forward. The storyline goes back, showing familiar scenes with Jack delivering speeches in front of Fight club members, where previously we have heard Tayler. Jack realizes that Marla is in danger of being killed by his own troops and he fights to rescue her.

The final duel between Jack and his alter ego- Tayler takes place at a top floor of a building with windows displaying a night view over the city. Jack shoots at himself to kill off his Tayler self. Tayler is gone, Jack is still alive, cheek bleeding, and Marla has been saved.

Jack reaches Marla’s hand. Holding hands they watch buildings exploding and collapsing at a music background with peculiar lyrics, “Where is my mind” by Pixies.

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2. Psychoanalytic analysis on selected scenes.

2.1 Introduction: The present study explores the establishment of personality as a transition between illusions and apprehension of the otherness of the mother, limitations of the infant’s potence and reality prohibitions.

On the ground that the films presents us with the idea of over-accentuation of psychical reality in comparison with material reality, I will argue that due to a failure in the earliest relationship, fear was experienced in a way that prevented from accomplishing a realistic view of infant’s own powers and accepting reality and prohibitions. Instead, the character, Jack, has withdrawn from the outside world in the fragmented inner world of imagination, under the rule of a violent superego. He lives by the otherness within either by means of the abandonment of object cathexes or reclaiming of split-off pieces. The character is confronted with the foreign components of his psyche, the split-off parts, the phenomenon of the double personified in the role of Tayler.

In this thesis I scrutinize the nature of the narrator’s relationship with the only female character, Marla Singer, as depicting aspects from the negative response to the process of disillusionments in the earliest relationship with the mother. Transiting between Jack and Tyler, Marla has a unique access to both parts of the same person.

In an attempt to trace back to the foundations of the main character’s inner object world I will examine another character- Bob, who has female breasts and no testicles, as a representation of an early illusion that is the infantile phantasy that the mother has a penis.

2.2 Disillusionment I shall begin the analysis with further exploration of phantasies in a very early mental stage and shall study the response to the reality manifestations with reference to the film cinematography and text.

The opening scene could be examined as an infant’s phantasy or memory of illusion for the quality of an early relationship with the mother in the character’s inner world (see point 4.1.2, page 21 in theoretical reasoning). The gun barrel could represent the mother breast stuffed in suckling’s mouth. Jack confesses “That old saying, how you always hurt the one you love? Well, it works both ways”.(ref. scene 1). On the ground of that violent pressure, 27

it could be argued that the early object relationship was not based on love and trust. What follows is that child's frustrated love turns to anxiety and then to hate if the frustration has been sufficiently severe. Hate of a loved object is intolerable. The love relationship must be preserved by any means. One of the possible paths discussed in the subsequent analysis involves abandoning the mother as she appeared in reality and withdraw in the inner world of imagination (see point 3.2, page 11).

Throughout the film the narrator locates the blame for all of what has happened on a woman: ‘Suddenly I realize that all of this – the gun, the bombs, the revolution –has got something to do with a girl named Marla Singer.’(ref. scene 2). Within the British Object Relation thinking the lack of success in the earliest relationship determines failures in psychic development (see point 3.1 and 3.2, page 11). Marla has got something to do with “all of this: the gun, the bomb, the revolution”. The gun could be seen as the breast stuffed into the infant’s face. The bomb and the revolution could represent threads and conflicts in the primitive inner world of the paranoid-schizoid position.

We meet Bob in first 10 minutes of the film. Jack has buried his face between Bob’s tits “sweating tits that hung enormous the way you'd think of God’s as big” (ref. scene 3). A world where man have huge tits, could be as well a world where woman have penis, or a phantasy for mother having a penis. According to Freud’s essay on infantile sexuality one of children’s theories of sexuality “consists in attributing to everyone, including females, the possession of a penis” [Freud, S. 1908, 215p.]. In this line of thoughts Bob appears as representation of an early phantasy of the mother that the narrator has abandoned in his imagination. From the very beginning the film’s plot depicts pieces of Jack’s inner world that during the entire storyline the spectator puts together.

Step by step we are drawn deeper in the character’s fragmented inner object world.

The scene with the self-help group ”Remaining men together”where Bob takes Jack into an embrace gives a clue to the consequences for the internal dynamic of the repudiation to give up phantasies in order for an apprehension of the otherness of the outer world and of the mother’s presence to take place. Bob pulls Jack's head back into his chest. Jack tightens his arms around Bob’s chest.We hear Jack’s voice: “Then... something happened.I let go...I was lost in oblivion -- dark and silent and complete”(ref. scene 6).The word “oblivion” means “the state of being unaware or unconscious of what is happening around one”, “the state of something that is not remembered”.Jack pulls his head back from Bob’s t-shirt and looks at a man’s face formed from his tears. He continues: „I found freedom. Losing all hope was freedom”. I consider this episode as the character’s specific response to the anxiety 28

experienced in the process of disillusionment. Due to a failure in the earliest object relationship, Jack chooses to address his aggression, frustration, fears and disappointment to a foreign presence within his self. In compliance with Graham Clarke, it is fear that generates splitting and repression within inner reality (see point 3.3., page 13). The narrator suffers from insomnia and seems numbly aware of the hiatus and fatuity in his social life. The face on the t-shirt could appear as a clue that Jack will psychically resolve his problem by splitting and projecting his rage and disappointment for those who fail to recognize his needs, vulnerability and have denied care (Layton, 2011).

Minutes later at the first Methodist church meeting room- testicular cancer group, we meet a woman. Marla, the outrageously dressed,wrapped in haze the only female character played by Helena Bonham Carter. She is introduced as the ‘big tourist’ who visits Jack’s selfhelp groups. (ref. scene 9) Jack’s voice over continues: “this chick Marla Singer did not have testicular cancer.” I allow myself to elaborate more on the analysis of the children’s theories of sexuality. The narrator’s interaction with the female character Marla, represents the quality of the earliest relationship that has remained utterly based on illusions later on. Marla as well as Bob, appear as the earliest phantasy from the mother. “This chick … did not have testicular cancer” could be heard as another echo from the phantasy of a mother having a penis (she is part of a group “remaining men together”, testicles go with a penis). The illusion is exposed and the blame is put on Marla instead of accepting the faultiness of one own assumption. “She was a liar”,“Her lie reflected my lie”. At a point where the relationship has become unsatisfactory, the mother has not been recognized as incomplete. The establishment of personality is a transition between illusion of omnipotence and realization of the mother’s otherness and limitation of the infant’s potency (see point 3.4, page 14). Instead of a successful transition through a process of disillusionment, the infant has remained captured in a network of phantasy and the mother was accused of being a reflection of a lie.

The subsequent scenes discover the consequences for the internal dynamics from the negative response to disillusionment. In the beginning the plot depicts the monotonous and secured life of Jack, who is picturing a “crash or a midair collision”. Later we hear Taylor, while burning Jack’s hand, with lye, says: “First, you have to know, not fear, know that some day, you’re gonna die”. Fear has remained the dominant motivation in Jack’s relationship with others. The psychic faith of the main character and the illusive nature of his relationships support the hypothesis that contact with reality was impaired. Soon he is about to meet Tayler, who is a personification of the foreign components of the character’s psychic, repressed and split-off. Tayler is an ideational double whose violent acts and fervent speeches remind us of 29

the Kleinian conception of the superego consisting of a split-off parts of the ego that acquires both protective and threatening qualities (see point 4.1.1., page 18). Tayler is a creation dating back to the earliest time of mental development (see point 4.1., page 17). The character lacks a sense of coherent identity, his ego is fragmented, divided unity embodied in the roles of Jack and Tayler. The unaccomplished escape from illusions is seen as a switch to a primitive state chatacterized by splitting, omnipotence of thought, a punitive Superego, an impaired reality testing and to experiencing the radical otherness of our unconscious. From the moment of their encounter the film provide us with various examples in terms of scenes and lines of a split in psychic experiences between illusions and reality, submission and aggression, omnipotence and fear, longing to connect and isolation.

The point where the character partakes of a rocky journey to finding “the other” within the self that will make him complete is marked by the scene where he decides to whom to call- Marla or Tyler. (ref. scene 17)Jack reaches Tayler. He makes a choice between reconnecting to the earliest object and splitting within the self. I explore the scene as the moment in the inner space where the baby left alone with disappointment does not chose to address its pain to the mother. Instead the infant takes a different path and decides to resolve the conflict by taking badness upon himself. In that case Tyler is an embodiment of the double, personifying the bad or threatening part of one self.

While the call to Tyler reflects the narrator’s choice at that moment for a withdraw into his imagination and a split within the self, the call to Marla reflects the possibility once narrator had had to respond positively to mother’s attempt to disillusion the child and to return to a loving trusting relationship with mother. In Winnicott’s view the apprehension of the mother’s otherness fosters a trust in the outer world as “a safe and interesting place in which to exercise that creative power” (Turner, see point 3.4, page 14). Asser explains the switch to psychotic functioning with inadequately handled disillusionment, regarding mother’s otherness from the baby (see point 3.4, page 14). While denying the separate existence of external reality, Jack took himself as libidinal object and retreated inside. In Kleinian language the depressive position was not reached and the splitting process (splitting the object and within the ego) from the paranoid-schizoid position has remained active (see point 2, page 8).

Jack strives with the rush of reality. He has supported secured life made of monotonous job, no friends or lovers, what excites him are lifestyle possessions. Jack’s narcissistic personality has never given up illusions and primitive modes of thinking such as omnipotence of thought (Freud, 1919, see point 4.1., page 16). Until the very end of the film 30

the viewer is immersed in and deluded by the “materiality” of Jack’s inner world. We witness processes and object relations that come from the earliest stages of psychic development revived in a life of an adult.

At the very bottom of the violent quest he undertakes, lies the illusion of completeness. That is the unconscious yearning for a return to the unity with mother and the world or the hope of “finding the other that will make us complete” (Gutman & Millat, see point 4, page 15).

2.3 Otherness The second part of the analysis investigates the effects of the negative response to the process of disillusionment on developing an experience of otherness. The character’s inner world has been reorganized over a “foreign presence” within the self “from which various phenomena are felt to emanate”and is captivated in fear, omnipotence wishes and means of prohibiting reality manifestations (see point 4.2., page 22).

How Jack comes to meeting Tayler Durden we see in the scene at the airplane cabin (ref. scene 16). Tayler: Wanna switch seats? Jack: “No. I'm not sure I'm the man for that particular job."… Tayler: “The illusion of safety”. As we would have known if we have seen the whole story, both men are one and the same person .At this point we are dragged into the foreign lands of Jack’s unconscious. We are spectators of a man’s internal split and confrontation with the outcast parts. Taylor’s suggestion “Wanna switch seats?” is Jack’s response to disillusionment. He has already involved himself in a complex world of phantasies where reality has never been accepted. A man with boobs (Bob) has been chosen towards a woman in search of mutuality (Marla, “When people think you are dying they listen to you instead of… “ Jack: “waiting for their turn to speak” ) to hold the revelation of Jack’s inner world. Marla as being representative for the mother in Jack’s earliest relationship is accused of being liar. Bob as being representative for an early phantasy of a mother having a penis is saved and contains the idea of a foreign presence within the self (the wet face on the T-shirt).

The movie goes on and we learn more about Tayler who is “a night person”. The narrator describes him: “He works as a projectionist. It old theatres, two projectors are use so someone has to change projectors at the exact second when the reel ends and another begins.

Sometimes you can see two dots on screen in the upper right hand corner. They are called

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“cigarette burns”. It’s called a changeover. The movie goes on and nobody in the audience has any idea.”(ref. scene 20) Should we examine closely the nature of the relationship between Tyler and Jack, we understand that from the very beginning we were drawn to character’s entangled world of inner object relations. What we, as an audience having already seen the end of the film, observe is one person projecting different parts of the same person.

In Grotstein’s words Jack and Tyler are the “internal dreaming couple” where both switch places between the dreamer who dream the dream and the dream who comprehend the dream (see point 4.2, page 22). At this point we could think of Jack as dreamer who is trying to understand the dream and for Tyler as the dreamer who dreams the dream. Later in the film we would be introduces to their dream and near the end we could reconsider Jack to be the dreamer who dreams.

Taylor appears as the unconscious consisting of libidinal and aggressive instinctual drives and repressed wishes or in Kleinian thought- an embodiment of persecutory internal objects, the split-off bad threatening parts (see point 4.2, page 22). His job as a projectionist could be seen as a visual representation of the work of the inner world where through the process of projection and introjection the ego and superego are formed in parallel (see point 4.1.1, page 18).

On the basis of an exploration of the preceding scene (involving Marla and Bob) I suggest that phantasies have remained supreme at the very core of the relationship with the mother. Fear and shame rule over the character’s inner world as a result from the broken transition from illusory omnipotence to realistic potency.

Fight club is initiated soon after the telephone call.The narrator and Tyler leave the restaurant they have been at. Tyler is astounded by the fact that even after 3 pitchers of beer, the narrator can’t ask him if he can stay with him. ‘Cut the foreplay,’ Tyler says, ‘and just ask, man’. The narrator asks, Tyler accepts, and then Tyler asks for a favor – ‘hit me as hard as you can’and they break out into fisticuffs.(ref. scene 22) This is when the fight begins. Jack has resorted to revival of an early state –a sense of narcissistic and omnipotent unity with the environment (see point 4.1.2, page 20) and readmittance of the split-off threatening parts of the self. Freud refers to the infantile ego as a “divided unity”. The ego is both subject and object (see point 2, page 7 and 8). In the object relation theory personality is seen as a result of relationship with people in the external world which are internalized. Klein suggests that phantasies of internal presences begin in the first months of life (see point 2, page 7 and 8). Jack is confronted with his otherness, experienced 32

as a foreign presence. The bad, doubled part do not stop haunting the good one and eventually challenges it to duel (see point 4.1, page 16). The fight is an attempt to cope with anxiety and prohibit reality demands. What we observe is a man’s painful journey into the strangeness of oneself that is rather similar to a psychoanalytic situation (see point 4.2, page 22).

According to Suttie and Macmurray, fear produces aggression and hatred as a response to having love threatened or withdrawn. Graham Clarke asserts that the overall motivations for development in our earliest relationship are love and fear. Fear generates splitting and repression within inner reality. Freud conceptualizes anxiety as experiencing fear of the object loss or object’s love loss. The same anxiety that has pushed Jack to refuse to the mother’s attempt to disillusion the child and sustain a loving relationship, has turned into a violent fight within the self. Due to the effects of fears and omnipotence wishes the character’s perception of reality was destroyed. Taylor as Jack’s double embodies all the “unfulfilled but possible futures to which we still like to cling in phantasy, all the strivings of the ego which adverse external circumstances have crushed (Freud, 1901).

Jack and Tayler move in a lonehouse (ref. scene 23). The uncanny dwelling that both inhabit could represent the house of the unconsciousness. Later in the storyline the only others that we will see in the house are Marla and members of “Fight club”. The house appears as the arena of Jack’s unconsciousness where various object relations, repressed wishes and aggressive drives are enacted (see point 4.2, page 22).

For Fight club the narrator speaks: “It was at the tip of everyone’s tongue. Tayler and I just gave it a name”. “You weren't alive anywhere like you were there. But Fight Club only exists in the hours between when Fight Club starts and when Fight Club ends.”(ref. scene 27) The borderline between illusion and reality is effaced. Jack is living within his own imagination. (16) Fight club is a ruthless attempt to constitute identity, involving the abandonment of object cathexes and disturbing reclaiming of split-off pieces.“When fight was over, nothing was solved, but nothing mattered”.

The infant is created within illusions until they are disillusioned through experience and apprehension that the mother is not magically perfect in her provision (Winnicott, see point 3.4. page 14, point 4.2, page 23; Guttman, Millat, see point 4, page 15). As Guttman and Millat put it, the first illusion from which all other stems is the belief in the possibility of wholeness and perfection. The main character has given up upon mother as appears in reality and has embarked on a narcissistic quest to find the “other” who will make us complete within one self. He calls Tayler. Fight club was as “their gift to the world”. “This was mine and Tyler's gift… our gift to the world”.

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2.4 Disillusionment and otherness The storyline gets more complex with the sexual intercourse between Marla and Tyler.

Hereafter Marla reaches both parts of the same personality.

In relation to the part that Marla is in contact with, Tyler or Jack, the character’s relationship with Marla appears as oscillation between longing to merge and isolation. Jack, the disparate part, is in denial of any intimacy and dependency on the female figure. Tyler, the double, the active, annihilating part is speaking of Marla only in terms of sex.

In his inner world Marla induces enactment of the earliest relationship with the mother. Going back to the process of disillusionment (see point 3.2, page 12), in Macmurray’s account of the negative response of disillusionment, based on the continued existence of fear, he describes one as being over-compliant and the other as aggressive or rebellious. During the entire action we see Marla in access either to Jack alone, or to Tyler alone. Over-compliant could stand for Jack’s attitude towards life and aggressive or rebellious for Tyler’s. Splitting has remained on the ground of establishing connections in character’s life.

The impaired reality perception and the schizoid character of the earliest relationship with the mother could be examined in Jacks/Tyler’s relation to Marla. The main character denies any need for connection, recognition or care from Marla. Her presence is experienced as intrusion, disruption, delusion. Narrator’s voice: “She invaded my support groups. Now she’d invaded my home”(ref. scene 29).

In steamy surreal pictures we observe Tayler and Marla having sex in the house. It is the next morning when we hear Jack speaking for the first time on behalf of an internal organ: “I am Jack’s raging bile duct.” If we go back at the foundation of the internal world, we would think of the important maternal function of containing and organizing the baby’s earliest sensations. (24). In the course of the film action, whenever the narrator experiences extreme emotion, we hear him speaking on behalf his body or feelings: I am Jack's Cold Sweat; I Am Jack's Complete Lack of Surprise; I Am Jack's Smirking Revenge.; I am Jack's wasted life; I am Jack's inflamed sense of rejection.; I Am Jack's broken heart. A fragmentation between somatic and psychic experience has remained in his life as an adult.

Freud writes that the ego is derived from bodily sensations and in its early stages of development the mind remains closely linked to bodily functioning. Corporeity is central to Klein’s account of early development (see point 4.1.1, page 18). The failure in the integration of Jack’s earliest emotional experiences and the fragmentation of the ego are also evident in the lack of organization between somatic and psychic experiences. Various emotional states 34

are described either as somatic experiences- cold sweat, inflamed sense, broken heart, or as feelings in third person- Jack’s complete lack of surprise, Jack’s smirking revenge. The same fragmentation is in the basis of his early unconscious phantasies. Looking at Jack and Tyler as parts of one fragile narcissistic personality structure, we see them as products of the primary defense mechanism: splitting and protective identification, due to a failure to integrate good and bad representations, self-states and effects (Kernberg) (see point 4.1.1, page 20).

Jack’s unconsciousness is built on object choices (mother, father, God) that has brought resentment and dismay. That could be felt in the monologue that Tayler gives while burning Jack's hand with lye (ref. scene 34).“You have to consider the possibility that God does not like you, He never wanted you. In all probability, He hates you… We don’t need him.

Fuck damnation, man. Fuck redemption. We are God's unwanted children? So be it!”. His inner world is imbued with mortification that he is trying to cope with a sense of omnipotence and prohibition of reality. Tayler says:“First you have to give up. First you have to know, not fear, know that someday you're gonna die”. Otto Rank reminds the Homeric conception in which man has a two-fold existence: in his perceptible presence, and in his invisible image which only death sets free, “this and nothing else is his psyche. In the living human being… there dwells like an alien guest, a weaker double, his self other than his psyche … whose realm is the world of dreams. When the other self is asleep, unconscious of itself, the double is awake and active” (Rank, 1914). In this sense “to know you’ra gonna die” alludes to the possibility that death is the world of dreams where dwells a foreign presence, a double.

“To give up fear“ might sound as a seductive deal to Jack for Tyler to alleviate the pain. On the one hand it is fear that object’s love is lost or withdrawn that is the motivation for the negative response to disillusionment that brings Tayler on stage. On the other to give up fear not for the dominance of love and mutuality but for a withdrawal into a relationship with another part of our unconscious involves unreality. To accept Tyler’s deal is to give up the belief in material reality of phenomena and accept the dominance of omnipotence, omniscience and psychic reality over mature dependence, real relations to others and sharing of our world. Macmurray writes that the Self is constituted by its relation to the other (see point 3.1, page 10). It could be suggested that to give up fear is to give up the reality of interpersonal relation on the account of living within one’s own imagination.

Jack’s withdrawal in an inner world and captivation with the foreign presence within is exposed by Marla. She is the one who questions Jack’s integrity. Later on, with an answer, she will prompt the character to face the other within himself and thereby reestablish the process of disillusionment.

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The question Marla asks to Jack: “What do you mean by us?”shatters the veneer of Jack’s identity.(ref. scene 48) She is trying to establish contact with Jack’s personality instead of having separate access to both split-off parts of the same personality.

If in our imagination, we continue the conversation we could assume that she would have been the trigger for Jack to encounter his own otherness. Later in the film Marla is the person who reveals disillusionment for both Jack and the audience.

The character is in capture of the phantasies of his inner object world and has built a fence of illusions to protect from the anxieties experienced. Tayler appears as incarnation of illusions for omnipotence, immortality and omniscience (see point 4, page 15). Before the deliberately caused car crash, Tayler asks: “What do you wish you'd done before you die?” (ref. scene 55) Jack has no answer, he has not come to desire.The disturbed sense of identity prevents him from connecting with his feelings and desires. He has lost sense of reality and is utterly in the illusion of completeness with the alien other of his mind.

Before Tayler’s withdrawal that brings Jack to disentangle the psychic game he plays upon himself, Tayler pictures: „In the world I see, you're stalking elk through the damp canyon forest, around the ruins of Rockefeller Center. You'll wear leather clothes that will last you the rest of your life. You'll climb the vines that wrap the Sears Tower. And when you look down, you'll see tiny figures pounding corn, Laying strips of venison on the empty carpool lane of some abandoned superhighway.”(ref. scene 56)Tyler illustrates “surmounted modes of thought” (see point 4.1.2, page 21) dating from a stage when the ego have not been sharply marked off from the external world and others. Tyler embodying the double pictures future and repressed strivings that the infant ego still cling in phantasy. The illusion for a world that Tyler is building comes from an early developmental stage of the unrestricted narcissism where man strives to fend off the manifest prohibitions of reality. In light of Kleinian thinking it stems from the internal world of object interactions before any attempt of disillusioning the child.

The reality demands are getting more and more tangible as the film continues. Soon the figures that represent the earliest inner object relationship- Marla and Bob will play crucial role in putting forward the line between reality and phantasy.

The house is full of strange members of project “Mayhem”. Tayler is gone. Bob is shot (ref. scene 59). His dead body lies on the table with a gunshot wound to the head. Jack is angry, crushed and confused. Bob, the man with “bitch tits” or the phantasy of a mother having a penis is dead. His inner world of phantasies is cracked. It is the beginning of a harsh disillusionment, that includes violent letting go of the other for whom and through whom one 36

formed an identity. Jack embarks upon a frantic pursuit of Tyler, his yet to be discovered double.

The escape he have found in living within his imagination is soon to be exposed. We could examine Bob’s death as the first burst of reality that refutes what Jack used to believe is the image of his mother.

The narrator’s veneer begins to crack and he is wandering wondering who is who „Is Tyler my bad dream, or am I Tyler's?“ In the following scenes Jack is about to encounter the foreign component of his psyche. Marla is the character that exposes Jack’s illusion. She calls the narrator by name Tayler Durden and describes their relationship as this: “You fuck me, then snub me.You love me, you hate me.You show me a sensitive side, then you turn into a total asshole.Is that a pretty accurate description of our relationship, Tyler?” (ref. scene 63).

This part of the study offers to reexamine the process of disillusionment.Behind director’s decision for the only female character to serve the reality of events we could see reenactment of mother’s attempt to disillusion the child and introduce them to reality and a realistic view of their own powers. Once, the consequences of disillusion for the internal dynamic of the character have not been favorable for the development of a strong good object.

The infant has withdrawn from the outside world and what the film has showed to us is the inner world of the character’s imagination. Fight club and Project “Mayham” represent the violent theater he is playing. He has entangled himself and the audience in an unconscious plot where he seeks after an extreme resolution for the frustration and fear that the relationship with the mother and the external reality brings.

As Jack speaks to Marla about Tyler, by verbalizing, he takes control over the anxiety(ref. scene 63,64). To put it in another way, Tyler illustrates the unconscious other and Marla- the external other (see point 4.2, page 22 and 23). We understand ourselves through speaking and acting and in both speaking and acting we become external to ourselves (Allik, see point 4.2, page 23). Through language, Jack reassembles the parts he had sent into exile and is able to develop a dialogue with the foreign components of his psyche.

The foregoing discussion implies that we might consider the rest of the plot, from this point on, as repetition of process of disillusionment. Jack was provided with the opportunity to reinvestigate the boundaries between imagination and reality and reevaluate his frustration of the first loved object- mother.

Once the character had come to realize the psychic game he is playing, Jack runs to save Marla and the residuals left from the world he used to know from his own violence and anger. Project “Mayham” could be seen as an attempt for a psychotic destruction of any 37

integrity under the ruler of the split-off threatening parts of the personality. The foundation of 12 building wrapped with explosives could be read as a metaphor for piles of memories and illusions structuring the personality (ref. scene 68, 74).

I chose in my interpretation of the last scene to allow the possibility of reestablishing the process of disillusionment with a different ending. Once again Jack is faced against the choice to accept or deny reality with its limitations (inner and outer) (ref. scene 75). He shoots himself and “kills” Tayler. In his search for separate identity he has reclaimed the splitoff pieces that were stored in the foreign component of his psyche. The earliest relationship with the mother has remained in the realm of illusion and trust in the outer world as safe place was not fostered. Instead he has abandoned the mother as she appeared in reality and has withdrawn from the outside world. The film shows how one is playing on and living byhis own otherness.

In the renew attempt for disillusion, Jack gives up primitive modes of thinking and defenses. He chooses to reconnect with the inner object of the mother, represented in Marla’s face. By unraveling the projective identification that is playing with the double, he manages to build separate identity, apprehend the otherness of the mother (in Marla’s face) and the existence of outer material world (ref. scene 77).

It would be correct to say that adopting such a possibility for a reenactment of the process of disillusionment with a different respond in a life of an adult is more advantageous towards life than the consequences for the internal dynamics of failures in development of early object relationships. I allow myself such analysis on the basis of the artistic freedom that cinematography allows. What we have come to know for our psyche is in the very beginning based upon analysis on patients and dreams. Films, book, painting, works of arts present to us the opportunity to trace back the cracks in our unconsciousness and trace the attempts of a man to rebuild his inner world from the residuals. The artistic endeavor brings a vantage point to the foundation of our mental life and brings different perspective on the consequences of frustrations and failures in early development.

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Conclusion „[...] I have avoided you from a kind of reluctance to meet my double. […] whenever I get deeply absorbed in your beautiful creations I invariably seem to find beneath their poetic surface the very presuppositions, interests, and conclusions which I know to be my own. […]

So I have formed the impression that you know through intuition – or rather from detailed self-observation everything that I have discovered by laborious work on other people.” (Freud to Arthur Schnitzler, 14th May 1922) The present study offers an exploration of emotional experiences, mental structures and dynamic processes and conflicts illustrated by a work of art. Having conducted a psychoanalytically informed investigation of the inner world of the main character in the film “Fight club”, I came to the conclusion that the usage of art works in explaining psychoanalytic conceptions enlightens on complex theoretical concepts and advances toward a better understanding in terms of the vidvid dialogues and pictorial forms the films provide us with.

In spite of that at the conclusion of my research quest I arrive with far more questions than I have had initially embarked on with, I recommend such an exploration of the foreign components of our psyche for any of you that have came to read these final lines of my work.

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Attachments SCENE 1 & 2 At the establishing shot we hear a voice over saying: “People are always asking me if I know Tyler Durden.” “With a gun barrel between your teeth, you speak only in vowels“. The opening scene introduces Jack with a gun barrel lodged in his mouth. Minute later we know it is Jack’s voice and we hear about the demolitions committee of project Mayham who wrapped the foundations of 12 buildings with explosives. Jack knows this because Tyler knows this. Then we hear Jack deducing: “And suddenly, I realize that all of this: The gun, the bombs, the revolution...has got something to do with a girl named Marla Singer”.

The following 2 hours illuminate the beginning and the viewer fits chronologically the events leading to the very beginning of the film.

SCENE 3 The narrator brings us back to earlier events. Jack explains that from 6 months he couldn’t sleep. “With insomnia, nothing’s real. Everything’s far away. Everything’s a copy of a copy of a copy”. In the next few minutes we hear him citing names of big corporation and setting a value system centered on lifestyle possessions. He is wondering “What kind of dining set defines me as a person?”. He has replaced pornography with reading a luxury design magazine. Jack is interrogating a doctor if he could die of insomnia and says that he wakes up at places where he had no idea how he got there. Jack appeals for barbiturate medications to relieve his pain. He is send to First Methodist to see “real pain”, the guys with testicular cancer.

SCENE 4 Again we are drawn back at the scene with the self-help group ”Remaining men together”. Bob takes Jack into an embrace. Bob pulls Jack's head back into his chest. Jack tightens his arms around Bob. We hear Jack’s voice: “Then... something happened. I let go... I was lost in oblivion -- dark and silent and complete”. Immediately after the lines „I found freedom. Losing all hope was freedom” we seize wet tears marks on Bob’s t-short, resembling a human face.

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Jack is into a deep sleep. The narrator’s voice says: “Babies don’t sleep this well”.

The voice soundtracks the setpoint of his addiction to visiting support groups (for people with biological disturbances/diseases).

SCENE 5 After indefinite period of treating his symptom in this way, going each night to a different group of sick and dying people, Marla Singer, who “ruined everything” shows up.

Her appearance looks dark, gothic, yet childish. She is smoking her way through the same self-help cancer meetings that the narrator attends- ‘Remaining Men Together’. “This chick did not have a testicular cancer. She was a liar”. The narrator had seen Marla at the other group meetings he is partaking in- blood parasites, sickle-cell circle, and tuberculosis. The narrator could no longer cry because, as he puts it: „Her lie reflected my lie“. The reason why he could no longer cry, he could no longer sleep.

SCENE 6 The scene is set at an airplane cabin. The seatbelt light goes out. Jack has fallen asleep and snaps awake. From next to Jack’s seat, we hear a voice that we have heard before: "If you are seated in an emergency exit row and you feel you would be unable or unwilling to perform the duties listed on the safety card, please ask a flight attendant to reseat you”. Jack: "It's a lot of responsibility.” Tayler: “Wanna switch seats?”. Jack: “No. I'm not sure I'm the man for that particular job."… Tayler: “The illusion of safety”. This is how Jack meets Tayler Durden for whom we have heard at the very beginning of the film.

Jack and Tayler have the same brief case. Indeed, if one look closer in the preceding scenes they will discover there are traces from Tayler’s presence. We hear Tyler at the very beginning of the film, but the first time we could see him, he stands next to the photocopier in Jack’s office. At a first look the viewer usually misses it because it is a cinematographic effect- extra frame at a higher rate that often one misses. Back at the airplane cabin Tayler who is seated next to Jack explain that he makes and sells soap, “the yard stick of civilization”. He also adds that if you mix gasoline and frozen orange juice, one could make napalm.

SCENE 7 When the narrator arrives home from this particular trip, he discovers that his apartment and all his belongings have been blown up. In the rubble Jack finds a paper with Marla’s phone number. He is in a telephone booth calling Marla. She picks up, he hangs up.

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Then Jack dials Tayler Durden’s number. Nobody answers. A second later the telephone rings and we hear Tayler’s voice on the other side of the line.

SCENE 8 Jack and Tyler are sitting at a bar. Tyler offers case scenario worse than the fire in his condo- “A woman could cut off your penis while you sleep and toss it out of a car”. Jack is lamenting over the loss of his material possessions that were so close to making him complete. Now we hear Tayler’s set of believes. He describes humans as consumers and glorifies imperfection. “The things you own end up owning you.”

The scene is set at a concrete parking lot. Jack has just asked if he could stay at Tayler’s place. Tyler asks him for a favour: “I want you to hit me as hard as you can”. The picture freezes and we hear narrator’s voice who is about to tell us a little bit about Tayler Durden. Tayler is “a night person”. He works as a projectionist in an old movie theater. His job is to change between two projectors at the moment when the reel ends and another begins.

“It’s called a changeover. The movie goes on and nobody in the audience has any idea”. We are presented with an example- into a family movie Tayler splice a frame of pornography.

Nobody from the audience knows they saw it but they did, nor any catches Tayler’s work behind.

SCENE 9 We are back at the wet parking lot. Jack refuses to strike Tayler addressing the scene as craziness. Seconds later Jack punches Tayler and they begin to fight. The next shot shows the two man sitting on the curb with blood dried on their faces and drinking beer in a heavy relief.

SCENE 10 Tayler leads Jack toward a lone wreck house that he dwells. Now they live in a leaking house very close to collapsing from the inside. Meanwhile other men join the fights at the parking lot. Inside the house we see rain draining from the floor. Tayler is riding a bicycle dressed in a robe with earflap hat on his head. Jack is reading an article written by an organ in the first person.

SCENE 11 “It was on the tip of everyone’s tongue. Tayler and I just gave it a name”. “Fight club” is initiated and it has two major rules- not to speak of Fight club and not to speak of Fight 42

club. Jack enlightens us that Fight club exists in the hours between when Fight club starts and Fight club ends. “You weren’t alive anywhere like you were there. Who you were in Fight Club is not who you were in the rest of the world”. The ideals of body perfection, beautiful face, designer underwear, step by step, are replaced with knocked out teeth, dried blood, broken faces, fist fights and pain.

SCENE 12 The next shots show surreal pictures of a sex scene. Jack wakes up. We see him having breakfast at the table in the kitchen. He hears footstep approaching, Marla walks in.

Jack’s face changes into bewilderment. He asks her what she has been doing in his house.

Marla swears at him and leaves. We hear Tayler laughing and see him dressed in his pink rope. Lines and pictures elucidate the situation. Tayler has picked up the handset Jack left hanging while Marla was at the other end of the line. It is the first time we hear Jack speaking by an organ in first person “I am Jack’s raging bile duct”. While Tayler is giving details on what has happened we hear the voice over “Put a gun into by head and spray my brains…

She invaded my support groups and now my home”. Tayler makes Jack promise not to talk to Marla or else about what is happening in the house. Next we see the house cracking under the pressure of the slamming loud sex Tayler and Marla are having. Jack hears everything and does nothing. In the mornings before she leaves is the time when we see Jack and Marla together.

SCENE 13 Tayler explains and shows to Jack how soup is made. He comes to the point where is about to mix lye. Tayler takes Jack’s hand, licks his lips and kisses the back of it. Tyler pours a bit of the flaked lye onto Jack's hand. “This is chemical burn.” Jack's whole body jerks.

Tyler holds tight to Jack's hand and arm. Tears well in Jack's eyes; his face tightens. “The first soap was made from heroes' ashes, like the first monkey shot into space”. Tayler speaks of fathers, who were their first model of God. Fathers who bailed. He considers the possibility that God “does not like you… never wanted you… he hates you”. “We don’t need him… Fuck damnation, fuck redemption. We are God’s unwanted children? So be it!”. Jack struggles to release his hand, he tries meditation to stop the pain. Tayler holds tightly Jack’s hands refusing him the opportunity to escape from the “greatest moment” in his life. “First you have to give up. First, you have to know, not fear, know that someday you’re gonna die”. “It’s only after we’ve lost everything that we’re free to do anything”. Jack stops fighting. Then Tayler

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pours vinegar to neutralize the burn. “Congratulations. You are one step closer to hitting the bottom.”

SCENE 14.

It’s daytime. Jack sits at the table and sips coffee. Marla walks into the kitchen: “I'll be out of your way in a sec.”. He answers that she doesn’t have to go and asks her about the support groups. Marla says that one of the women is dead. In reply to another question Marls asks him if he cares. In a little while Jack asks her what she is getting out “of all this”. Then he adds “Why does a weaker person need to latch on to strong person… What is that?”.

Marla replies with his previous question and asks him what he gets out of it. “It’s totally different with us” Jack says. Marla repeats “us?” and continues “What do you mean by us?”.

Only Jack hears noises from the basement, Marla insists on continuing the conversation and not changing the subject. Jack turns - through the crack of the open basement door, we see Tyler who is staring at Jack from the bottom of the stairs. Talyer asks: “You are not talking about me, are you?”. Marla continues persistently with more questions. She insists on him looking at her. Then she sees the scar on his hand and asks him who the perpetrator is. “A person” he answer and refuses more details. Marla guesses that he is afraid. He denies. We hear Tayler’s words (from the basement) coming from Jack’s mouth: “This conversation is over”. Marla backs away: ”I just can’t win with you, can I?”. She leaves out the back door.

Jack opens the basement and heads downstairs where he sees bunk beds.

SCENE 15 Tyler gets in the driver's seat at a car with a bumper sticker: “Recycle your animals”.

Jack gets into the front passenger seat. There are two men at the back seats. It is raining. Jack is frustrated and insists on an explanation why he wasn’t told about project Mayhem and why he is not involved from the beginning. The two men repeat in one voice: “First rule of Project Mayhem is you do not ask questions”. Tayler elucidates “Fight Club was the beginning. Now it's moved out of the basements and it's Project Mayhem”. Jack is angry and envious, he remind Tayler that together they have initiated Fight club. Tayler says: “Is this about you and me?... This does not belong to us. We are not special.” Opposing headlights get closer fast.

Tayler steers back at the lane. He speaks loud and clear right at Jack’s face. Jack is getting more and more furious. Tyler demands him to forget what Jack thinks he knows about life, about friendship and especially about them. Tyler steers into the oncoming lane, speeding up.

Tayler asks “What do you wish you'd done before you died?”. We hears two answers: paint a self-portrait and build a house. Jack replies: “I don’t know. Nothing.”. Tyler: “If you died 44

now, how would you feel about your life?”. “I don’t know. Nothing good.”. Jack fights to turn the wheel and yells “Fuck Fight Club! Fuck Marla! I am sick of all you shit.” Talyer looks straight at him asking clearly: “Why you think I blew up your condo? Hitting bottom isn't a weekend retreat. It's not a goddamned seminar. Stop trying to control everything and just let go!” Jack lens back at the passenger seat. The four men buckle up seatbelts. Tayler speeds up and smashes into a stalled car. The back of their car whips around and carries it into a roll down a hill. Tayler hold Jack’s head in his lap, tapping his chest.: “We've just had a near-life experience!”

SCENE 16 Jack lies in bed with eyes empty. Tyler sits on the floor: “In the world I see, you're stalking elk through the Grand Canyon forests around the ruins of Rockefeller Center. You'll wear leather clothes that will last you the rest of your life. You'll climb the thick kudzu vines that wrap the Sears Tower. And when you look down, you'll see tiny figures pounding corn, laying strips of venison in the empty car-pool lane of some abandoned superhighway”. The camera slowly switches between Jack and Tayler. At the end of the scene we see men’s trousers with a suitcase leaving the room, closing the door from behind. Tayler has gone.

SCENE 17 We hear turmoil from inside the house. Jack turns back and walks in. The members of the new project “Mayhem”, so called Space Monkeys, carry in a dead body in black clothes and a ski mask on his head, putting it on the table. Space Monkeys explain that something went wrong while executing a task from the project and Bob was shot. Jack pulls the ski mask off the corpse. It is Bob, with a gunshot wound to the head. Jack yells to everyone and is close to crying. He refuses them to bury him at the garden, “This is a person. He is my friend… This is Bob”. One of the guys makes an objection that in Project Mayhem they have no names. Another replies: “I understand. In death, a member of Project Mayhem has a name”.

SCENE 18 We hear the narrator’s voice instructing: “Please return your seat backs to their full upright and locked position”. Jack bursts inside a hotel room, grabs the phone and dials Marla. He asks her if they have ever done it. Annoyed, Marla defines the question as stupid and asks if he wants to know whether she thinks they were just having sex or making love.

“We did make love” Jack replies. Then Marla puts it in that way: “You fuck me, then snub me.

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You love me, you hate me. You're sensitive, then you turn into an asshole. Does that describe our relationship, Tyler?”.

The narrator’s voice proceeds: ”We just lost cabin pressure”. Jack wants Marla to repeat his name. “Tayler Durden! You fucking freak!” is her answer.

SCENE 19 Tayler Durden appears sitting in a chair at the hotel room “You broke you promise.

You fucking talked to her about me”. Jack insists to know why people think he is Talyer Durden. We see familiar scenes with Jack (Edward Norton) executing Tayler’s leading role.

Jack alone comes to the conclusion “because we are the same person”. Tayler explains: “You wanted a way to change your life… All the ways you wish you could be, that's me. I look like you wanna look, I fuck like you wanna fuck. I am smart, capable and, most importantly, I'm free in all the ways that you are not.

Past scenes flash back and show Jack in the leading action. Jack is standing beside an empty chair, Jack is alone beating himself up at the wet parking in front of the restaurant where Tayler and Jack have met after the phone call. Jack is shocked “This isn’t possible.

This is crazy.” Tayler says: “You still wrestle with it, so sometimes you're still you… At times, you imagine you're watching me”. We see scenes from the initiation of Fight club, where Jack, not Tayler, holds a fervid speech in front of members. “Little by little, you're just letting yourself become Tyler Durden” continues Tayler back in the hotel room. Jack refuses to believe. Tayler lists the facts- the house is rented in Jack’s name, Jack works at night because he cannot sleep and sums up that technically Jack is the one fucking Marla, but “it’s all the same to her”. Jack sees in flashback sex scene with Marla where he is the one making out with her. Tayler says: “Now you see our dilemma. She knows too much. I think we're gonna have to talk about how this might compromise our goals”. Jack is in maze. He tells Tayler that Tayler is insane. The last corrects him: “No. You are insane”. The voice over comments “It's called a changeover. The movie goes on and nobody in the audience has any idea.”

SCENE 20 Marla and Jack sit at a restaurant. Jack is trying to explain the situation to her. He admits “I know it seems there’s two sides to me…”. Marla replies back: “Two sides? You are Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Jackass.”. He continues that we wasn’t fully aware of the extend of their relationship and that he hasn’t treated her well. Jack apologizes and shares that he really likes 46

and cares about her. Marla relents for a moment but soon enough her composure disappears in response to Jack’s next words: “Marla, your life is in danger… I’ve involved you in something terrible”. Marla calls him insane. She says she has tried and that there are things about him that she likes, nevertheless she thinks he is intolerable and with serious emotional problems. Marla gives up the conversation, stands up and leaves the restaurant. Jack runs after her. “You are not safe! Marla, you don’t understand! Marla, I am trying to protect you!” Jack insists. Marla wants to be left alone. At the end of the scene, Jack stops a bus and convince her to get on the vehicle at a direction that he would not know. Finally Marla takes the money Jack is handing to her and gets on the bus. Before the door hiss shut, she calls his nameTayler, and tells him: “You're the worst thing that ever happened to me.”

SCENE 21 After a sequence of scenes where Jack is trying to get himself arrested and prevent the execution of Project Mayhem, he sprints down the street, in boxer shorts, under-vest, long coat and a gun in hand, looking like a mad man. He reaches a tall building where he meets Tayler. Jack runs frantic to the garage area, where a white minibus is parked. Jack opens the door and finds bomb with a digital clock set on 29 minutes and 58 seconds. Jack tries stopping the bomb. Jack and Tayler get into a fight. On the monitors at the security office we face Jack alone pointing a gun at the minibus. At the parking garage Tayler yells that Jack is firing a gun at his imaginary friend, then (Tayler-Brad Pit) starts beating him up. On the monitors we see Jack (Edward Norton) pulling and punching himself.

SCENE 22 The film cuts to where we have started, close on- Jack with a gun in mouth. Tayler counts down three minutes than says: “The beginning. Ground zero.” As Jack puts it “this is about where we came in”. We recognize Jack’s face and see Tayler with a gun in hand. Three minutes are left to the explosion of financial buildings. The scene is set in a gloomy dark atmosphere.

Two and a half minutes are left to the explosion that will bring “one step closer to economic equilibrium” through “the collapse of financial history”. “Think of everything we’ve accomplished.” Jack’s is seated on a chair. From the window he catches a sight of a stopping bus and sees Marla being dragged out. Jack begs Tayler to stop. Tayler corrects him ”We are doing this. This is what we want.” Jack is trying to resists: ”You are a voice in my head”. Tayler responds “You need me. You created me. I didn’t create some loser alter ego to 47

make me feel better… Have I ever let us down?... I will bring us through this. As always, I will carry you kicking and screaming and in the end you will thank me”. Jack is being grateful and begging him not to go that far. Tayler is angry and refuses to go back to the “shitjob” and watching sitcoms in a “condo fucking world”. Jack repeats to himself that this can’t be happening, that this is not real.

Jack: ”You're not real, that gun...That gun isn't even in your hand. The gun's in my hand.”. We see the gun in Jack’s hand and Tayler- empty handed. Jack points the gun under his chin. Tayler is curious why he wants to put a gun to his head. Jack corrects him- “our head”. Talyer calls him Ikea boy. Jack loads the gun. He stands up, tells at Tayler: “I want you to really listen to me. My eyes are open.” Jack takes the gun’s hammer into his own mouth and shoots. Jack drags down to the chair, his cheek is bleeding. Talyer, looking disorientated, asks “What that’s smell?” Smoke wafts out Tayler’s mouth. The camera turns and we see the back of Tayler’s head blown open, revealing blood skull and brain. Tayler falls down at the ground. The next cut shows Jack alone, smoke coming out from Jack’s cheek and raising to the ceiling and. Tayler’s body is gone.

SCENE 23 Space monkeys bring furious Marla in the room. Jack is standing up, head tilted, with a gun hanging down from his hand. Jack=Tayler sends the boys away. Marla comes near him yelling at his face: “What kind of sick fucking game are you playing at?!” Suddenly she sees his face. She asks what has happened, takes out wadded tissues and tries to apply them at the wound. Marla asks who did this, Jack replies “I did, actually.” Marla is astound by the fact that he has shot himself. Jack assures her that he is ok. “Trust me. Everything’s gonna be fine”. Untill that point the sequence has been with diegetic sounds. Now we hear music playing, followed by a massive explosion. Marla and Jack look out the windows at buildings exploding and collapsing upon themselves. Jack and Marla are silhouetted against the skyline.

Jack reaches to take her hand. Marla looks at him and he says: “You met me at a very strange time in my life.”

We hear a male vocal. “With your feet on the air and your head on the ground”. Jack and Marla are staring at the last collapsing buildings. Voice singing: „Try this trick and spin it. Yeah! In front of them opens up a city night view. Jacks turns his head towards Marla and so she does.

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No building are exploding, only smoke traces are visible in the night sky. Voice singing: “Your head will collapse but there's nothing in it”. Shaky camera effect. Vocal: “and you'll ask yourself“. For part of a second we are shown up against a frame of a hairy penis.

The song goes on: “Where is my mind? Where is my mind? Where is my mind? Way out in the water. See it swimmin.'

I was swimmin' in the Caribbean. Animals were hiding behind the rocks. Except the little fish. But they told me, he swears. Tryin' to talk to me, to me, to me. Where is my mind?

Where is my mind? Where is my mind? Way out in the water. See it swimmin'.

With your feet on the air and your head on the ground. Try this trick and spin it. Yeah!

Your head will collapse if there's nothing in it. And you'll ask yourself. Where is my mind?

Where is my mind? Where is my mind? Way out in the water. See it swimmin' With your feet on the air and your head on the ground. Try this trick and spin it.

Yeah!”

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