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Dear Sirs,
I am writing to express my appreciation of the analysis of the film Fight Club provided by Jeanne Wolff Bernstein ( Int. J. Psycho-Anal., 83: 1191-9). I share her concern that the practice of psychoanalysis has become too geared towards creating a ‘sense of coherence’ rather than helping the patient to tolerate and investigate the nature of an otherness within. Fight Club provides an opportunity to examine the frightening discovery of an ‘other’ in the inner world through Jack's gradual realisation that he is sharing the same body as Tyler Durden.
Jung has described, in his autobiography, his own discovery of two personalities in his inner world. He says,
Somewhere deep in the background I always knew that I was two persons. One was the son of my parents, who went to school and was less intelligent, attentive, hard working, decent and clean than many other boys. The other was grown up, old in fact, sceptical, mistrustful, remote from the world of men, but close to nature, the earth, the sun, the moon, the
Page 1442weather, all living creatures, and above all close to the night, to dreams… (1995, p. 61).
Jung was also explicit about the way these two personalities often eclipsed each other in awareness and that this resulted in a seamless ‘changeover of personalities’. This parallels the central metaphor in Fight Club of the changeover of movie reels in which ‘the movie goes on and nobody in the audience has any idea that a change has taken place’. The difficulty of perceiving this changeover is further illustrated in Fight Club because the director, David Fincher, has introduced a splicing process that affects the viewer of the film. Although Jack and Tyler ostensibly ‘meet’ for the first time when sitting in neighbouring seats in an aeroplane, subliminal images of Tyler standing in the same room as Jack appear earlier in the film. These images last only a tenth of a second and are only visible if Fight Club is viewed on a video recorder or DVD player that can be pa