Who is Tyler Durden?

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2006-05-29-fight-club_x.htm

This is why I want to be hurt, and why I end up with some form of self-injury as a means to just keep on going, to keep on waking up the next day. I guess more and more males are coming to grips with that aspect of themselves, and finding a comfortable social outlet where they can express it, as violent of a way they need.

From the article:
There is also a sadomasochistic thread running through underground fight clubs, said Michael Kimmel, a sociology professor at Stony Brook University in New York.

"Real-life fight clubs are the male version of the girls who cut themselves," he said. "All day long these guys think they're the captains of the universe, technical wizards. They're brilliant but empty.

"They want to feel differently. They want to get hit, they want to feel something real."

One of the simple motif's of Palahniuk's Fight Club, that is glossed over, is the basic concept of want. This desire of lack that so many men in society feel, those goals that once we obtain, give us no feelings, that give us nothing for all the struggle that we've put into it. It's simplified into the modern conception of what most people know as the Oedipus complex, but instead as understood within the concept of psychoanalysis as a tool that instead of helping, produces neurosis and that within modern society, namely capitilism, where one cannot ever reach a point of satisfaction, it can be compared to the organic disease of schizoprenia -- all of this was elaborated on in detail by Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus (and explained much better than I ever could).
When we're left wanting, empty, stretched beyond our abilities, there has to be something to fill the void. Self-injury is often labeled as a borderline trait, when yes, they frequently use it to survive, and yes I do mean survive, but they've grown up in a chaotic world and are faced with a stagnating society where their goals equate to working meaningless jobs, with meaningless promotions, with meaningless marriages and meaningless lives -- and they just happen to see clearly and honestly through the bullshit media, friends, and family give us each day. With men, no one really thinks about how they might deal with this. We see so many examples of how males hold their feelings inside, and how they struggle and make their goals green lawns and a better job, but do they honestly ever feel happy with these small changes? With that greener lawn, that they have to spend an extra hour a day on now? With that higher paycheck, that they have to come home angry and upset because of the extra stress that it comes with? I wonder how many of those men cope with their problems in ways that people don't want to think about. Abuse, hurting their wives, self-abuse with drugs: alcoholism, cocaine, whatever -- the numbing way to hurt oneself or a passive way to say, kill me now, because I have lost the willpower to do it to myself, or, again, there is always the stereotyped and well-known idea of self-injury. For me, self-hurt, is the most consistent and easiest way to fill that emptiness that you are faced with when you come home from a long day, and realize that you really have accomplished nothing for yourself. That self-awareness that I'm just another cog on that wheel, being ground down day after day, holds no comfort to me, and so I turn to the simple things that do. Hurt.

"sometimes the best treatment is no treatment at all"

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/30/health/psychology/30beha.html?_r=2&oref=slogin&oref=login

Thanks, Heather, for the link.

"A few years back, one of my residents was treating a young man in psychotherapy who had great difficulty deciding what he wanted to do with his life.

He wasn't depressed, but he was a very passive person.

It became clear that the patient was using the treatment not to understand his passivity, but to indulge it; he enjoyed talking about what he should do, but made no steps outside of therapy despite many attempts to address his behavior. We stopped his psychotherapy and referred him for vocational counseling.

The possible benefits of no treatment go beyond just patients who get worse in therapy. Some patients have been in psychotherapy for so long that it isn't clear what the advantage of treatment is; in some of these cases, stopping therapy gives patients a chance to discover that they might do fine without it.

Others might seek treatment during a crisis or when they are grief-stricken. As painful as these situations can be, if people are generally healthy and have good social supports, they are likely just to feel better with time and probably don't need any treatment at all.

At first blush, it might sound paradoxical — even uncaring — but sometimes the best treatment is no treatment at all."