Multiple Personality Disorder/Dissociative Identity Disorder

Multiple Personality Disorder/ Dissociative Identity Disorder

The Strange case of Jekyll and Hyde novel by R.L.Stevenson is a classic Victorian Gothic Horror. The character Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde shows symptoms of a split personality after he has drank the potion. Dr Jekyll is a well respected man but he has a small incline of evil her feels in his soul but is to afraid to show it as he will be criticised. Jekyll successfully creates a potion that enable him to free his evil soul under his own power, thus Mr Hyde was created. He is able to please his own evil cravings through Hyde, Hyde is different not only in feelings but in his looks as he looks deformed and grotesque. Mr Hyde becomes to powerful and takes over which leads Dr Jekyll to his death.

“With every day and from both sides of my intelligence, the moral and intellectual, I thus drew steadily to that truth by whose partial discovery I have been doomed to such a dreadful shipwreck: that man is not truly one, but truly two."

As you can see in the book Dr Jekyll is struggling with with his good and evil, showing their is a split personality and he creates a monster to allow ones self to step into the dark side.

The symptoms of a split personality is basically is a condition that causes a person to show multiple personalities but Dr Jekyll shows the symptoms of Dissociative Identity disorder which presents different personalities at distinctive times and each personality doesn't sometimes recall what the other has done, but in the novel Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde recall what the other has done which also doesn't tie in with multiple personality disorder. The characters a more in common with Dissociative Identity Disorder as they see completely different people taking over at precise times. The physical appearance of them both changes from old age to younger and deformed.

"Thus, Stevenson creates in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, two equipotent, coexistent, and eternally opposed components that make up a “normal”"

They are both the same person just split, one is pure evil and has no good in him and the other is a good respectable man. It comes to the point where Dr Jekyll doesn't need to take the potion and just turns into Mr Hyde this is something people with split personality have and can't control.

Resourses:

Indian J Psychiatry. 2008 Jul-Sep, A study in dualism: The strange case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2738358/

Dereck, 2010. The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. In: April 30th 2010 . https://psychology2.wordpress.com/2010/04/30/67/