Fight Club this is what happens when a literary genius here's the joke phrase why are you punching yourself in answers with an anarchist psychodrama with a jarring twist this cult classic is famously a story within a story you come for the brutal narrative about disaffected Gen Xers beating the crap out of each other and leave with a mind-bending anarchist epic about a mild-mannered insurance rep who unbeknownst to himself is the charismatic leader of a domestic terrorist organization thank you literary genius and in this episode we're gonna talk about how Fight Club is even better than you think a whole 11 years before Christopher Nolan made a thing and a thing in a Thing Thing this cinematic gem was hiding a third narrative in its compound plot buried beneath all the punching philosophy and abs is the very relatable story of a troubled person's journey to overcome self-imposed limitations and become a more complete individual the psychological drama of a man versus his shadow hello I'm will arias the therapist founder and CEO of the fictional character mental health co-op where we diagnose all of your favourite characters from TV shows and video games and provide them with the coping skills necessary to take their mental health issues to suplex city hit the subscribe button to join our treatment team today at the co-op we are diving into one of the most complex minds we have analyzed on this channel our patient the narrator wait really that's his name oh okay anyway the narrator probably left you with a lot of questions by the time we reach the end of his story but chief among them is how do you get this suave sociopath from this special snowflake well today we answer that question so in the case of the narrator the easy part is actually his diagnosis he is one person with two personalities yep what you were thinking is exactly wrong if you were thinking multiple personality disorder because that is not what it's called the condition is called dissociative identity disorder and if you got it right extra smart bonus points for you feel free to brag about it in the comment section d ID is a very controversial diagnosis as in there's a significant portion of the psychological community that is not convinced that it's real condition there are definitely people out there who present with apparently distinct multiple personalities and very detailed differences between them including different posture speech cadence word choice and handwriting however the field of psychology is split in two with regards to why this is the case so let's start with the explanation 1 di D is caused by severe childhood trauma which makes the person's ego split into multiple distinct personalities so let's test this theory on our Enigma enigmas enigma let's analyze personality 1 our protagonist presents as a mild-mannered diligent corporate employee who is not overly aggressive even when he wants to be he is conscientious he is organized and shows no outside indicators of his discontent but fortunately for us we can hear a stream of consciousness and know that in his case still waters run very very deep the first thing that you notice about the narrator is that his lines in the movie are mostly in his own internal dialogue and he doesn't say nearly as much to the other characters as he thinks in his own head this is consistent with the personality trait of introversion and because we can hear his internal thought process we realized the narrator is not merely an unthinking cog in the machine but has an expansive knowledge of his place in his own corporation and his corporation's place in larger impersonal system of capitalism everything's a copy of a copy of the copy when deep space exploration ramps up it'll be the corporations that name everything he builds a philosophy of the world that is based on his observations of his professional life and is also informed by his own personal history of emotional neglect contrary to his button-down exterior the narrator has a vivid imagination he's constantly fantasizing catastrophe confrontation and connections the last of which is shown to be very important to him the narrator is a deeply sensitive person who learns for emotional connection and to belong to something meaningful he wants to feel cared for so badly that he's even willing to lie about having testicular cancer to get the emotional closeness he didn't receive as a child on this channels very first video we mentioned the big five personality traits which is the most commonly used measurement of personality the big five traits are openness to experience conscientiousness extraversion agreeableness and neuroticism based on his observed behavior the near appears to be moderate on openness highly conscientious low and extraversion highly agreeable and highly neurotic so that's the narrator now let's take a look at his better half his other better half Tyler Durden bursts onto the scene with bombastic enthusiasm and seemingly zero concern for pretty much everything he's charming childish and charismatic he appears to be very much the opposite of the narrator Tyler is self-confident while the narrator is self-effacing Tyler is impulsive while the narrator is reserved but what he hasn't common with the narrator is that he also has more to him than meets the eye while the narrator uses silence and politeness to conceal his brooding psychological tardis Tyler uses his bro ish live-in-the-moment image to get people to let their guards down before using a tidal wave of charisma to sweep them into his world of big plans and big ideas Tyler is perceptive he can see right through a person to see their wants needs and vulnerabilities and uses a weaponized emotional intelligence to mold them into what he wants like a monkey ready to be shot in his face space monkey sacrificed himself great Tyler also has a disdain for the corporate machine but unlike the narrator has a radical plan of action for actualizing his disdain he rarely expresses emotion that is not connected to a concrete goal that he has in mind and seems perfectly fine with this lack of emotion he is surrounded by people and connected to none of them looking at Tyler Durden big five personality traits we see very high openness very low conscientiousness high extraversion high agreeableness and low neuroticism so yeah they actually seem to be nearly opposite personalities one guy is insightful but largely ineffectual workaholic the other is a dangerous domestic terrorist who saw that coming he did almost a century ago in 1921 psychologist Carl Jung published psychological types in it he theorized that different personalities and pathologies were not the result of psychosexual disruptions as Freud had thought but instead of distinct psychological functions intuition sensation thinking and feeling each of which could be introverted or extroverted this theory later became the basis of the myers-briggs theory of personality according to Jung the more person expresses one of these functions the more they will repress its opposite function becoming a part of the person's shadow we mentioned our shadow a little bit in our analysis of the dark nights Joker when it appears in mythology it represents those wild primitive forces outside of civilization but according to Jung what they really are are projections of the more primitive aspects of our own personalities you've probably seen this an unemotional tough guy unexpectedly crying out a movie that's a shadow a goofball tight end who is secretly very financially prudent that's a shadow when the sweet unassuming free spirit is suddenly ready to fight you about crossing a line you didn't even know was there that is a shadow so with this theory of personality in mind let's take another look at her narrator we see that he's introverted suggesting that in the Jungian system his primary cognitive function would be introverted in his internal dialogue we see that his tendency is towards making observations not judgment these observations are abstractions from his immediate experience into insight about the world in general these all suggest that our narrator would be Jung's introverted intuitive type consistent with Jung's pay sure of the interpreter intuitive the narrator is bookish imaginative and reserved mystery of Big Ideas also consistent with Jung's picture of the introverted intuitive type is that the more the person expresses the traits of an introverted function the more its polar opposite function is repressed listen to Jung's description of the introverted intuitive types Shadow the introverted intuitive Chiefs repression falls upon the sensation of the object for we find in his unconscious a compensatory extroverted sensation function of an archaic character impulsiveness and unrestrained are the characters of this sensation does that sound like anyone you know but while they have different approaches to actualizing their goals they actually have the same goals and same beliefs the narrator uses emotional dishonesty to create a community and so does Tyler the narrator believes that corporations are dehumanizing and emasculating and so does Tyler the narrator believes that the loss of the self-preservation instinct is the beginning of freedom and so does Tyler losing all hope was freedom only after we've lost everything Tyler is the repressed self actualizing function of extroverted sensation that puts muscle behind the narrator's ruminations the narrator says I think therefore I am Tyler says I do therefore it's done let's get drunk so Young's Theory tells us why when the narrator's personality split its split into these components but how did the narrator's personality split in the first place because while the narrator has insomnia and depression we don't really see a major traumatic experience so this brings us to theory - about the origin of the ID that it is suggested to the patient by a trusted Authority and they internalize the belief that they are two people studies show that people with the ID tend to be imaginative check stressed check and highly suggestible suggestibility is the tendency to internalize the beliefs of others and we see from the opening of the film the narrator has done quite a lot of internalizing outside beliefs so where did the belief that the narrator was - people come from it came from society throughout the movie the narrator struggling with his role in the world he internalized to believe that to be good he has to follow the educational and corporate path laid out to him by others hierarchical organizations tend to discourage independent thought and self assertion which is why compliance is presented to people as morality and the narrator desperately wants to be a moral person so anything in his personality that falls outside of the unrealistic line that he is drawn around the psyche is projected on to be alter ego that he created for himself all of the narrator's independence boldness and courage is repressed into a shadow until it erupts from a powder keg of insomnia alienation and sexual frustration but of course this is an illusion Tyler is part of his personality and he needs him without Tyler the narrator will passively go along with a depersonalized system that he hates and Tyler also needs a narrator because without him he's a dangerous emotionally manipulative cult leader he gets people killed for no reason by overcoming the cognitive distortion that his moral Center and capacity for impact are incompatible with each other narrator is able to become a more healthy balanced person before going to prison all right exciting announcement I know that you guys have been waiting for this for a while now so I'm happy to announce that our next diagnosis will be looking at the Joker just kidding trust me I know well how DC fans feel about Jared Leto subscribe to our Channel and click the notification button to see our next diagnosis video the riveting Academy Award winning 2019 Joker don't forget to like this video and share with other psychology enthusiasts as we expand our treatment team if you'd like to learn more about the psychology of personality click here I'm hilarious the therapist thanks for watching you