A Psychoanalytic Study Of The Strange Case Of Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde

Robert Louis Stevenson is a famous novelist,essayist and poet in the 19th-century Victorian period.The Strange Case of Dr.Jekyll and Mr.Hyde is his masterpiece.Once published,this novella has attracted the attentions of many experts and scholars,and has also attracted many critics to analyze it.The protagonist Dr.Jekyll and Mr.Hyde in the novel have become synonymous with dual personality.In the medical field,“Dr.Jekyll and Mr.Hyde” has also been used to refer to patients with dual personality.Most scholars at home and abroad analyze this novella from the aspects of its origin,genre,narrative method,and dual personality,etc.,but few analyze it from the perspective of Degeneration Theory and Freud’s Personality Theory.Even if some scholars once utilize Freud’s Personality Theory,however,they argue that Mr.Hyde is a completely evil person,who is only controlled by id,but ignore the existence of ego in Mr.Hyde.So there is a space left to do more exploration on this novella.This thesis will analyze the psychological conflicts of those protagonists,and the reasons which cause their inner conflicts and Degeneration with Freud’s Personality Theory and Nordau’s Degeneration Theory.This thesis is divided into five parts: introduction,three chapters and conclusion.Introduction is a brief description of Stevenson’s life experiences;plot of his masterpiece,the Strange Case of Dr.Jekyll and Mr.Hyde;and literature review on this novella abroad and home in recent years.Arguments,research methods and research significance are also put forward.The first chapter briefly introduces Freud’s Personality Theory and Nordau’s Degeneration,which provide a theoretical basis for this thesis.The second chapter reanalyzes the personality structure of Dr.Jekyll and Mr.Hyde with Freud’s theory.Mr.Hyde himself is a person with unsound personality,which is also doomed to his tragic fate.While Dr.Jekyll is a person with a sound personality with id,ego and superego,his tragedy that led to his suicide was mainly caused by the unbalanced development of his three personalities.In this chapter,the reasons why Dr.Jekyll and Mr.Hyde behave differently are also analyzed.That is because they hold different principles.Mr.Hyde who is id-dominated behaves based on pleasure principle,while the well-established Dr.Jekyll is uncertain in the pleasure principle and reality principle.Dr.Jekyll did not effectively deal with the contradiction between these two principles,which caused the tragic ending—his final suicide.The third chapter uses Nordau’s theory to study the degradation of Dr.Jekyll and Mr.Hyde.Their Degeneration is manifested in social status,morality,figure,and complexion and so on.According to Nordau’s argument,the causes of degeneration are the unbalanced development of their brain,and the pollution of modern civilization.And the conflicts between human’s awareness of liberation advocated by the industrial revolution and the harsh social customs,the suppression of strict religious dogma on human nature force people living in the 19 th century to seek for their liberation and humanity in an extreme way.Conclusion points out humans’ desires—the id are inherent in their personality.People must learn how to balance the relationship between individual desires and social norms;if desires are over suppressed,which will result in humans’ degeneration – living hypocritically and painfully;or even death.