Stage Three: Psychosis - Entering the Land of the Unconscious: The Self/Ego Death
... only after disaster
can we be resurrected
it's only after you've lost
everything that you're
free to do anything
nothing is static,
everything is evolving,
everything is
falling apart
you are not a beautiful and unique snowflake
you are the same decaying
organic matter as everything else
we are all a part of the same compost heap
we are the all-singing,
all-dancing crap of the world
you are not your bank account,
you are not the clothes you wear
you are not the contents of your wallet
you are not your bowel cancer
you are not your grande latte
you are not the car you drive
you are not your f*cking khakis
... i want you to hit me as hard as you can...
welcome to fight club
if this is your first night
you have to fight
~*~
Quote:
Early in the movie Jack lacks the courage to confront his shadow. Instead, Jack identifies with his persona, the role the world expects him to play. As the movie progresses Jack gradually begins to become aware of his shadow, and how it motivates his behavior. It is only by doing so that he begins the process of self-realization. One criticism that will be made is that the movie depicts a superficial and incomplete process of self-realization.
Source: Tripping Over the Shadow
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In the final scenes of the movie Jack puts a gun to his mouth and pulls the trigger. We must remember that as a character, Jack represents the ego.
Quote:
In his book, Mysterium Coniunctionis, Jung says that an experience with the self is always a defeat for the ego but that the death of the ego (the self as you knew it) allows one to be reborn into one’s own wholeness as projections are taken back.
Source: Is it Love or is it Projection?
~*~
The initial disordered state that I am describing contains two distinct elements. The first is an experience of dying or of having already died, which symbolizes a dissolution of the accustomed self. The second element, closely related to the first, is a vision of the death of the world. In an acute psychosis individuals undergo a profound reorganization of the self, effected by a thoroughgoing reintegration through utter disintegration. ...
This is a difficult point, for we seem to find ourselves firmly biased against suffering and death as the ultimate enemy, dark and sinister, to whom we give no quarter and show no tolerance. You might say suffering and death are on an equal footing with madness in this respect.
We have seen that the growth process of the psyche, on the other hand, sees all this quite differently. According to the psyche's purposes, in order to break out of the security of solid consensus and convention, one must encounter the experience of the death process in psychic depth, and also at the same time the dissolution of the familiar, accustomed worldview. Though all this demand might seem at first glance overly drastic, it consists actually of the death of the familiar self-image and the destruction of the world image to make room for the self regeneration of each.
Source: Visionary Experience in Myth & Ritual
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Directed by David Fincher, written for the screen by Jim Uhls, and based on a novel by Chuck Plahniuk,
Fight Club was released to Americans recovering from the Columbine school shootings in the fall of
1999...
The last image of the film is framed as a vista from within a glass skyscraper. Jack and his lover, Marla Singer, hold hands at the "theater of mass destruction." Two tall towers crumble to the ground. Premiered years before September eleventh, the film serves as chilling prophecy even more profound and ripe with cultural and historical mythic elements than even this author had expected. ...
Source: Fight Club: A Jungian Interpretation