Dissociative Personality Disorder in Fight Club

In the movie Fight Club, the main character is experiencing symptoms that can be associated with Multiple Personality Disorder or Dissociative Personality Disorder. The narrator portrays many signs of this psychological disorder. Some are amnesia, hallucinations, having different personalities, and depersonalization.

Dissociative Personality Disorder has been distantly linked to overwhelming stress. When the narrator's alter ego first arrives, it is shortly after Marla steps into the scene. A way that the narrator was able to control his insomnia was by going to help groups. When his comfort of the help groups was taken away, his insomnia returned and caused a lot of stress which could, if such a link exists, have triggered the narrator's Dissociative Personality Disorder.

The first sign for the narrator that something is off occurs when he would wake in a different place than he went to sleep the night before. The occurrences are too much of a major change that there was no way that in a normal mind, the narrator would have forgotten. Along with waking up where he didn't go to sleep the night before, there are lapses in time that he cannot remember.

For both the movie watcher and the main character, another sign to show that there is a problem with the main character occurs when he is talking to Marla, giving her his usual cold treatment, and she cannot understand why. He asks her questions that are common sense questions to her, because it happens so often, but he doesn't remember ever doing it.

Toward the end of the movie it clearly shows that there are major problems with the narrator. A way to tell that he has Dissociative Personality Disorder is that his character compares to Tyler's, his alter ego, are very far-fetching. Where the narrator is quiet and timid, Tyler is quick-witted and sure of himself. The fact that the narrator is even seeing Tyler is a sign of the disorder because Tyler doesn't exist and is in fact a hallucination.

The real solid evidence to show that the narrator has a psychological disorder happens at the end where he is being detained by Tyler. Sure, Tyler may spell it out to him at that point in time, but this is where the depersonalization comes into play. Depersonalization can be defined in the terms of watching something happen from 'third-person' view because they have no control over the situation. The narrator is tied up and held at gun-point by Tyler at the end of the movie when in actuality, the narrator is holding himself captive, but has no control over it.

For these reasons, it is clear that the narrator in Fight Club did indeed have Dissociative Personality Disorder. He suffered from memory and time loss and well at seeing hallucinations, having two personalities, and holding himself captive.