Fight Club: Carl Jung’s warning for a lost generation

Carl Jung once said that "to confront a person  with their shadow is to show them their own light. " It might seem counter-intuitive  but it's one of his most powerful insights; the idea that the path to illumination and  becoming whole can only be found by exploring the darkest parts of who you are. And that each  and every person has a hidden capacity for evil.

It's a terrifying realization and it's only when  you make the choice to face your own demons, the things you're most afraid to explore,  that you can uncover your light and reach your highest potential. For me, it's also  the key insight in the movie Fight Club; it's a film that's just as relevant  today as it was when it came out in 1999. "When you wrote Fight Club you tapped into  something that it was really fascinating for me.

" "But it is that existentialist moment  where you realize that you have to sacrifice your youth for something.  It's a very Martin Heidegger moment where you realize you have to become  a being living towards death. You're not going to live forever and you've  got to give your life to something.

" It's hard to deny its cultural impact. "The first rule of Fight Club you do  not talk about Fight Club. " "What the hell happened to you?

I get it the first rule of Fight Club right? " We can think  of Fight Club as a kind of modern myth; a warning about the dark impulses that exist  in all of us, and there will be spoilers ahead. This is the narrator of the film; the whole story  is told from his point of view.

He hates his job. He drifts aimlessly from one distraction  to another. We never learn his name but his experience is so common that we can't help but  think that he's meant to represent all of us.

He has insomnia, and he says that when  you can't sleep nothing feels real; you're never really asleep and you're never  really awake. This is the first clue that something has gone very wrong. His half-waking  state symbolizes the fact that he's unconscious; sleepwalking through life he's in denial  about the most basic facts about who he is.

It's here that we meet Tyler Durden, a  mysterious man who rejects society and encourages the narrator to embrace his more  primal instincts. But there's a problem: Tyler isn't a real person; he's an imaginary  projection of the narrator's subconscious mind. Tyler embodies all the things the narrator wishes  he could be: confident, assertive, charismatic, but he also represents his darker side; a hidden  urge for power, chaos, and destruction.

All the things he's repressed into his subconscious. And  so the irony is that the narrator in fact has all the qualities he admires in Tyler because they're  the same person, he's just too unconscious to recognize it. One day he meets a woman named Marla  Singer.

He likes her but he's so disconnected from his own feelings that he won't admit it even to  himself. He's desperate for intimacy but when she hugs him he pushes her away. It's something a lot  of people can relate to.

We live in a world that cuts us off from our innermost authentic being. A  system of social conditioning that keeps us from going after the things that would make us feel  whole and alive. "We are the middle children of history," Tyler says.

"With no purpose or place,  we have no great war, no great depression. Our great war is a spiritual war, our great depression  is our lives. " Why does this happen to us?

If you imagine what you were like when you were  one or two years old, you had what you might visualize as a 360 degree personality. As children  we naturally express every part of who we are, but very soon our teachers, parents, and  other authority figures begin to influence us. We learn that some parts of us are socially  acceptable: politeness, taking instructions, being easy to get along with.

Little by little  we learn to conform. We build a self-image that carries within it everything we think of as good.  It becomes a social mask that we present to the world.

Jung called this "the Persona. " It's  reinforced by the world around us. By itself, the Persona isn't bad.

It's an important part of  ego development, but it's only one fragment of a much bigger self. In Fight Club we see how the  narrator builds his persona. He becomes a slave to what he calls the Ikea nesting instinct, spending  his free time buying mass-produced goods.

It becomes a part of his identity and he asks: "what  kind of dining set defines me as a person? " But all of this has another side, because at the same  time that we're building our ego and our persona, a hidden part of ourselves is growing. The  same people who tell us that some parts of us are good also tell us that other parts of us are  shameful and wrong.

Things like rage, jealousy, and resentment; all of the qualities that don't  fit into this ideal self-image become the very things we reject in ourselves; creating what  Jung called "The Shadow. " The sum of all those unpleasant qualities we like to hide; the parts  of ourselves we completely disown. We find it so unacceptable that we repress it, pushing  it deep into the unconscious mind.

In Fight Club the narrator's Shadow is Tyler Durden; he's  all the things we've been conditioned to reject. He steals cars, he works as a waiter  where he contaminates the food, and at night he splices single frames of graphic  and offensive images into family movies. And he encourages the narrator to do the one thing we're  all taught from an early age never to do: fight.

The shadow is the flip side of ego development  because we all have within us two selves: one conscious, the other unconscious; one we embrace,  the other we disown; one we display and the other we hide. They develop side by side out of the same  life experience, and so the ego and the shadow are mirror images of each other. This process happens  to everyone.

It develops naturally in every young child but there's a danger when we hide too much  of ourselves away. Because the more we put into the shadow the less we have conscious access to,  and the bigger and stronger the shadow becomes. Jung wrote that "everyone carries a shadow and the  less it is embodied in the individual's conscious life the blacker and denser it is.

. . at all counts  it forms an unconscious snag thwarting our most well-meant intentions.

" Because repressing the  shadow doesn't make it disappear. It's still there just below the surface where it continues to work  behind the scenes. When we ignore it, it takes on a life of its own influencing everything we do;  causing all kinds of compulsive behavior.

This is exactly what happens to the narrator. He comes  home one day to find his apartment in flames but he's repressed so much of himself that he doesn't  even realize that he was the one who did it. At night when he can't remember if he's  been sleeping or not, Tyler runs wild, and his shadow impulses take over.

Tyler tells  him that "you were looking for a way to change your life, you couldn't do this on your  own. " And so to maintain his self-image as a good and moral person he has to shift the blame  to something else. This is so common that we see it virtually every time a famous person makes  a public apology.

Will Smith's Oscar slap might be one of the clearest examples of someone who's  built a persona on kindness and non-violence and yet his unconscious shadow reveals a level  of rage and aggression he's kept hidden. "I don't believe in violence as the reaction  to violence, no no no like violence begets violence. I just couldn't connect to violence  being the answer love had to be the answer.

. . there is no part of me that thinks that was the  right way to behave in that moment.

" When people apologize for outbursts like this they'll often  say things like "I don't know what came over me, that's not who I am. " And yet it IS who they  are. It's the shadow side they're unconscious of because they've repressed it to the point where it  feels like a separate self.

The more they disown it the more it possesses them, making them act  out in all kinds of unexpected and damaging ways. But it's a mistake to think that the shadow  is always bad. It can be destructive, but it also holds tremendous energy and positive  potential.

It carries inside of it many of your greatest gifts and undeveloped talents. Most of  the qualities we've left behind from our childhood can be found somewhere within the shadow. The  psychologist Marie-Louise Von Franz describes a patient she had; a 48 year old man who'd lost  a lot of the joy he felt when he was younger.

This man told her about one of his dreams where  he was wandering in the yard of a strange building when all of a sudden an old childhood friend  showed up; someone he hadn't seen in years, decades. They walked together and saw three  beautiful horses running in the grass, but what did it mean? Von Franz says that her  work with the patient revealed that the old childhood friend represented "a still  unperceived part of the dreamer's own personality," something that had been a part  of him when he was a child but had long since abandoned and lost.

And yet here he was in the  world of the dream ready to make friends again. Our shadow is the lost part of us that wants  to reconnect; it wants to find expression, not to be hidden away. The horse symbolizes the  freedom the dreamer stands to gain by accessing these primal instincts, reclaiming his lost sense  of play in much the same way.

Tyler Durden also carries the positive qualities that the narrator  has lost. Tyler's not afraid of pain or adversity, he's the strength and the resilience we need to  pick ourselves up when we hit rock bottom, the part of us that wants to be tested, to see what we  could really accomplish if we had no other choice. Because it's only after we've lost everything that  we're free to do anything.

It's an important point because Tyler himself says that he's free in all  the ways that the narrator is not. The shadow also includes the unlived life inside of us and when we  learn to integrate it we can access a powerful new energy that we wouldn't otherwise have. These two  parts of ourselves are always in tension.

While the ego works to protect its positive self-image,  the shadow works to expand that self-image. It pushes us to explore the undiscovered parts of  who we are. It's the reason that true change can never come from the established values of  the ego; it can only come from the shadow.

There's a scene where Tyler confronts a man  named Raymond who works at a convenience store. He takes his wallet removes his student  ID and asks him "what did you go to school for? " "To be a veterinarian," Raymond tells  him.

"Well why did you drop out? " "Too much school," he says. "Would you rather be  dead Raymond?

" It's here that we learn that this wasn't a robbery at all. Tyler returns the  wallet and says "I'm keeping your license, I know where you live, and I'm gonna check  up on you. If you're not on your way to being a veterinarian in six weeks you will be  dead.

" He lets him go and Raymond runs away. "What was the point of that? " The narrator asks. 

"The point," Tyler says, "is that tomorrow will be the most beautiful day in Raymond K Hessel's  life. His breakfast will taste better than any meal you and I have ever tasted. " What Tyler does  in this scene is absolutely terrifying and morally questionable, but the shadow is an archetype  that exists outside of conventional morality.

It's beyond ideas of right and wrong. It's the  chaotic force in our lives that fights against stagnation. The moment we're too comfortable, when  we've played it too safe for too long, the shadow is the creative impulse that pushes us past our  comfort zone so we can keep growing and connecting with the things that make us feel alive.

And  when we experience loss, when it feels like our world is crumbling all around us, the shadow  is where we draw the strength and resilience we never knew we had; it was in us all along but it  was unconscious, waiting for us to tap into it. To make his point Tyler says that "you are not  your job, you are not the contents of your wallet, you are the all-singing all-dancing crap of  the world. You are the same decaying organic matter as everything else and we are all part  of the same compost heap.

" Why? Because in so many ways the shadow IS the crap of the  world. It represents everything within us that we've thrown away and tossed out like so  much garbage.

Garbage that's foul and offensive, but it's also the fertilizer that brings new life  to decay. And so it's our rejected shadow side that holds the key to rebirth and renewal. It's  what makes it possible to transform ourselves and become who we were really meant to be.

This  idea is actually common to many philosophical traditions including alchemy. The early alchemists  attached a lot of importance to what they called the "Prima Materia" which is the beginning  substance used in the alchemical process, and yet it was also described as 'useless excrement. '  Most people ignored it dismissing it is worthless, but through a process of heating it, distilling  it, and putting it through intense pressure, it could be transformed into gold; that same pressure  is what we need for our own transformation.

Jung emphasized the importance of living  your own unique life and connecting with who you really are; it's a never-ending process  of becoming whole, which he called individuation. The psychologist Jolanda Jacobi wrote that: "all  too many people do not live their own lives, and generally know next to nothing about their real  nature. They make convulsive efforts to adapt, not to stand out in any way, to do exactly what  the opinions, rules, regulations, and habits of the environment demand as being right, and so  they are slaves of what other people think.

" But the path to individuation is fraught with many  pitfalls. As we've seen, within the shadow also lies our darkest and most destructive impulses.  So how do we guard against these dangers?

Because the shadow is unconscious it can only be  known indirectly. One of the ways we see it is in something called "shadow projection. " It happens  when we look at other people and see within them the very things that we most want to deny in  ourselves.

For example, when the narrator first meets Marla he's been visiting many different  support groups for people who are dying. Even though he's perfectly healthy, he pretends that  he's dying too so that he can feel a sense of closeness and emotional release without having  to face the fear of death in himself. When Marla shows up to all the same support groups that  he's been going to, it makes him angry.

"She's a liar," he says. "She has no diseases at all,  she's a tourist, a faker. " Of course he might as well just be describing himself.

He projects all  these labels onto Marla because it's always easier to see them in other people than it is to admit in  ourselves. But an even bigger problem emerges when large groups of people come together and  act out their shadow projections all at once. When they single out people to target  and blame for everything that's going wrong, it becomes scapegoating.

Whether it's political  opponents, people with a different way of life, or a different ideology, it's always the  same: one group takes out all their hostility and frustration by projecting their negative  qualities onto another group. With the rise of social media it's easier than ever for people to  form ideological tribes where they project their own shadows onto people they disagree with. They  never think of themselves as evil and yet they see lots of evil in other people; this is called  the "Collective Shadow," and it takes many forms; from mass hysteria where whole countries become  possessed by their darkest shadow impulses to the fanaticism that happens when a persecuted group  carries the projection of everything the larger society rejects.

It often takes hold in a  leader who then carries and spreads those projections in ways that easily spiral out of  control. As Nietzsche once wrote: "Madness is something rare in individuals but in groups,  parties, peoples, and ages, it is the rule. " We see it when men from all over the country begin  to join Tyler in huge numbers; it grows beyond the fights they run in underground clubs and it  becomes a movement, expanding to every city across the country.

And it's no longer Fight Club  it becomes "Project Mayhem. " If Tyler Durden is an expression of the personal shadow then Project  Mayhem is an expression of the collective Shadow; all the things our culture tries to repress  and hide, the things our society finds so unacceptable it pretends doesn't even exist. The  problem is, just like with the personal shadow, the more a culture tries to repress it the more  destructive it becomes.

What's alarming is that these men aren't criminals or psychopaths like  you might expect. They're ordinary working people who've been seduced by a charismatic leader: "they  are the people who cook our meals, haul our trash, connect our calls, and drive our ambulances. "  Every single one of them feels more and more detached and disenfranchised by a system that  treats them as disposable cogs in a machine, and they connect with Tyler's message because  they're hungry for meaning and purpose in a world that seems more empty and superficial every  day.

Over time, we see how the members of Project Mayhem mindlessly conform and become disturbingly  cult-like. The first rule of Project Mayhem is that you don't ask questions. The goal becomes  destruction for its own sake, to bring down the buildings of major banks and credit card companies  in order to reset the debt record; it's here that Project Mayhem spirals totally out of control,  and Tyler reveals his dark vision for the future.

"In the world I see, you're stalking elk through  the Grand Canyon forests around the ruins of Rockefeller Center. You'll climb thick vines  that wrap the Sear's Tower. .

. when you look down, you'll see tiny figures pounding corn, laying  strips of venison in the empty carpool lane of some abandoned highway. " What we see in Project  Mayhem is a microcosm for what happens when we try to repress the collective Shadow; it releases  our worst impulses that threaten to destroy the basis of civilization itself.

And what's truly  terrifying is that the leader of the movement could be anyone. The narrator isn't special, he's  not an evil genius, he's not even consciously aware of what he's doing. We see examples of this  in the rise of fascism in World War II, but no group is immune from the shadow.

Even ideologies  that seem well-intentioned, that come from a genuine desire for good can fall victim to it.  When governments use censorship to silence voices they disagree with they're acting out a kind  of cultural repression. When ideas are canceled from the mainstream they're pushed away into our  cultural unconscious but they don't disappear; they're just forced further underground.

Because  throughout history we find that some of the most evil people who carried out the most horrific  cruelties believed they were doing good. When the shadows of entire countries are projected onto  the face of an enemy, any group can be made into a scapegoat. Those who are possessed by the shadow  genuinely believe that by destroying their enemy they're ridding the world of evil even as they  perpetuate that same evil within themselves.

So what can we do? Jung tells us that the only way we can hope to  challenge the world's evil is to become conscious of the shadow within ourselves. It's what the  narrator does at the end when he finally realizes all the damage he's done.

He takes responsibility  and accepts that he's the one that unleashed Project Mayhem onto the world. Most people are  afraid to face their own darkness because they're worried it might consume them if they do, but  it's just the opposite. The shadow takes hold of us only when it's unconscious.

Because "until we  make the unconscious conscious, it will drive all our behavior and we will call it fate. " Reclaiming  the shadow doesn't mean acting it out; it means becoming aware of the darker aspects within us  so we can discipline them and bring them into our control. The shadow isn't something we fight  against or destroy, it's a part of ourselves that we're meant to explore so we can reclaim those  aspects that we've lost.

In a future video we'll look at how you can integrate your shadow through  "shadow work. " Once it's available you'll see it appearing on the left side of your screen, and I'd  absolutely love it if you pressed the like button, it really helps me out. Do you have any stories  about confronting your shadow?

Do you have your own theories on Fight Club? Let me know. I'd love  it if you left a comment with a shadow emoji.

As always, thanks so much for watching, take care  of yourselves, and I'll see you in the next one.