Fight Club is a film based on the novel of the same name by Chuck Palahniuk. The film adaptation was written by Jim Uhls, directed by David Fincher and released on October 15, 1999. The film is about the life of the narrator, a depressed insomniac who works as a recall coordinator for an automotive company. The narrator is refused medication by his doctor, he turns to attending a series of support groups for different illnesses and uses these support groups for emotional release and this helps to temporarily cure his insomnia. This newfound care ceases to help him when a girl, Marla Singer, who is not the victim of any disease for which support groups are offered, begins attending the support groups. The narrator returns from a business trip to find his apartment destroyed by an explosion. He calls Tyler Durden, a soap maker and salesman he met on one of his business trips. Tyler offers the narrator a place to stay and together they start an underground "Fight Club" which the narrator uses as therapy for his insomnia. The club grows and becomes a source of psychotherapy for many other men. One of the concepts highlighted in the film is how modern men, in a seemingly civilized world, use violent and aggressive acts towards each other as a means of emotional release and satisfaction. In this article I intend to explore how the ideas of civilization and aggressive human instincts represented in the film characterize reality. This will be achieved using psychoanalytic concepts of civilization and the individual's inevitable quest to satisfy their instincts, as identified in Sigmund Freud's Civilization and Its Disturbances. The article will focus more specifically on the instincts of aggression and self-destruction as op...... at the heart of the article ......social relationships and cultural behavior, both of which play a key role in defining our perception of reality.Works Cited Fincher, David. Fight Club, (film) 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment, 2000.Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and Its Discontents, (trans. James Strachey), New York: Norton Books, 1989. Fine, Reuben. The development of Freud's thought: from the beginning (1886-1900) through the psychology of the id (1900-1914) to the psychology of the ego (1914-1939). New York: J. Aronson, 1973. Print. Oliver, Roland and Anthony Atmore. Africa since 1800. 5th ed. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005. Print. "Fight Club". Wikipedia 2010. Wikipedia Foundation, Inc.. 7 November 2010 Uhls, Jim. Fight Club Final Script, Internet Movie Script Database. November 7 2010