Infographic: The Psychological Path To Fight Club

Fight Club, the movie based on Chuck Palahniuk’s famous novel, stirred up a cult-like following after its release in 1999. Here’s a look at the world the movie inhabits – a dark, pessimistic place filled with sweeping consumerism and mental health issues that seem to result purely from living in the modern world.

Everyman Jack, the unnamed narrator, is an insomniac office worker whose materialistic drive to inhabit an IKEA catalog has driven him into an empty life of nihilism and disenchantment. His acts of consumerism are meant to suppress his dark feelings, but his cynicism still manages to get the better of his mind.

According to the film’s director, David Fincher, Jack is an inverted version of “The Graduate” archetype. Rather than seeing any of life’s possibilities, “he has no possibilities; he literally cannot imagine a way to change his life.” After having performed all the tasks society has asked of him without redemption, he must set out on his own sort of spiritual awakening.

Jack sees a doctor for depression in hopes of scoring some prescription meds, and the doctor tells him that if he wants to understand real pain, he should visit a support group for testicular cancer. The suggestion may have been a sarcastic one, but Jack acts on it anyway.

When he does in fact witness the very real problems of people in the support group, his insomnia finally subsides. Jack begins attending various support groups, for various problems he doesn’t have, multiple nights a week.

“This was freedom,” he explained. “Losing all hope was freedom.”

The freedom he experiences, however, is short-lived. A character named Marla Singer begins attending the testicular cancer support group, and her obvious fraud mirrors his own. Jack sees Marla as a manifestation of all his lies and his insomnia returns.

During Jack’s next turning point, he meets Tyler Durden on a flight. When he returns to his apartment, everything he owns has been destroyed in an explosion; a myriad of IKEA materials litter the street below.

His new form of therapy is born in Fight Club, a place where Edward Norton, who plays Jack in the movie, believes that men can strip away both the “fear of pain” and “the reliance on material signifiers of their self-worth.”

Source: Top Counseling Schools