John Launer: Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde revisited

A few years ago I wrote an article about Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde,1 the book by Robert Louis Stevenson that everyone knows about even if they haven’t read it. The novel depicts a respectable physician who concocts a drug to separate his good impulses from his evil ones.

In my article I covered some of the book’s medical influences, including the psychological effects of drugs such as morphine, cocaine, and ergot, all of which Stevenson had taken. I also explained its hidden references to John Hunter, whose fame as a surgeon and anatomist a century earlier had concealed his dark side as a procurer of corpses with dubious origins. After my article was published I more or less forgot about it until recently, when someone who had read it got in touch with an unusual request. It was an invitation to give an online lecture about the book in a series on science and literature at the Tokyo Institute of Technology. I said yes.

This time I wanted to examine the idea of someone having a “split personality.” Many readers seem to believe that Stevenson’s description of a person switching between virtuous and evil identities must equate with a real psychiatric condition, either known at the time or identified since. However, in Stevenson’s fantasy about a binary mind there’s little that maps onto schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, dissociative identity disorder, or any other recognised diagnosis. The novel is essentially science fiction, with no clear equivalence to anything familiar in psychiatry. In my lecture I argued that the book had probably contributed to misconceptions about mental disorders far more than it had furthered anyone’s understanding of them.

This isn’t Stevenson’s fault. Indeed, he never describes Dr Jekyll as having a split personality in the first place. Instead, he explains that Jekyll found it emotionally impossible to tolerate being a “composite” of both good and bad impulses and that he wanted to expunge the latter. In Jekyll’s final confession he explains how he was increasingly tortured by a sense of moral duplicity, having to act like a serious and grave physician while having shameful private thoughts. Although Jekyll imagined carrying out degrading acts, he never actually did so. It was only when his experiment to expel his baser side into the shape of Mr Hyde went horribly wrong that he felt impelled to commit real crimes, leaving him with no alternative to suicide.

If read correctly, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is really a manifesto for accepting oneself as comprising “multifarious, incongruous and independent” attributes, to use Stevenson’s own words. It’s a remarkably modern insight, corresponding with current ideas in evolutionary psychology about minds being constituted from a number of distinct modules. For doctors, the book is a salutary warning against pretension and perfectionism—or the delusion that you can ever be faultless, as a professional or a human being. If you haven’t read it recently, or at all, I’d certainly recommend doing so.