Chris Baxter
Intro to Psychology
Fight Club
And the effects of Schizophrenia
The movie Fight Club portrays a man that is experiencing several different mental disorders.
Mainly the film focuses on his schizophrenia, but other disorders make themselves prevalent as well
throughout the film. The narrator of the film is actually nameless throughout but for the purposes of
writing this paper I will call him Jack, as this is the only name that seems to refer to him in the film. I
believe that leaving him nameless in the film though is actually supposed to say something about his lack
of identity. The topic of this paper was supposed to be about multiple personality disorder; however I
don’t believe that this is the correct diagnoses. It seems that because Jack has created a second personality
this would be the diagnoses however usually someone with multiple personalities does not see their other
personalities. Because Jack interacts with his second personality it seems as though he suffers from
hallucinations and a delusional perception of himself. Robert Sternberg defines schizophrenia as “a
disorder marked by disturbances of perception, cognition, emotion, and motor behavior” (Sternberg
p.588). Jack suffers from hallucinations in which he is acting out in a way that he usually would not by
creating a second person that encourages him to do these things. I will focus this paper on Jack’s
schizophrenic behavior as well as the insomnia, and depression that he also suffers from.
The film opens with Jack experiencing insomnia. Insomnia is the inability to fall asleep or to
maintain restful sleep (encyclopedia.com). Jack believes that his long-term insomnia is terminal. “For six
months. I could not sleep. With insomnia, nothing is real. Everything is far away. Everything is a copy of
a copy of a copy” (Fight Club). This quotation shows that Jack feels in between real and delusional. The
sleep he loses carries over to the next day. He constantly falls asleep at work. He falls asleep on
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- Spring '08
- Hart
- Schizophrenia, Fight Club, Jack
-
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