Understanding Jekyll - Radio Times, June 2007

Features

Understanding Jekyll - Radio Times, June 2007

Professor Geoffrey Beattie explains how modern psychiatry reads the doctor's disorder.

"It seems a lot to ask that we should actually feel sorry for a homicidal maniac venting his lustful instincts around the streets of London. And yet, there is at least one school of psychiatric thought that suggests perhaps we should. For although the story of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde was one of the first in literature to portray the ghoulish potential to be found in a multiple personality disorder - these days referred to as Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) - the underlying causes might indeed demand our sympathy.

Not that this was likely to have been the intention of its writer back in 1885; rather less spectacularly, many suggest that the inspiration for Robert Louis Stevenson's imagination was the case of the Edinburgh city councillor Deacon Brodie, who was a respectable cabinetmaker by day and a burglar by night. This led Stevenson, who owned one of Brodie's beautiful cabinets, to brood upon the living of a double life and even the haunting possibility of the brute within us all.

Modern psychiatry, however, with the benefit of greater research, points to a fundamental mechanism provoking dissociation - the process of splitting off some thoughts and actions from the rest of consciousness - as a way of dealing with extreme stress or trauma. Some 98 per cent of adults with DID report abuse during childhood, and the theory is that the abused child learns to defend itself from the pain of abuse by splitting the memory from consciousness.

Indeed, in cases where the child is severely abused, this defence mechanism may over time lead to multiple personalities in which only one or two of them are conscious of the abuse, leaving the others with the blessed relief of remembering not a thing about it and therefore not susceptible to being continually overwhelmed by the nightmares of the past.

The book, of course, is more than a story about a split personality; it's also about how this change is consciously and deliberately effected by taking a home-made potion. Two American psychiatrists have claimed that clues in the book suggest that Jekyll's suffering is actually better explained by plain old substance abuse: there is evidence of tolerance, of withdrawal, of a persistent desire to cut down, significant time spent recovering from the effects - with social activities reduced as a consequence - together with physical complications.

The psychiatrists' guess is that magic mushrooms might have been the culprits, which they say could account for the change in perception of body image, as Hyde is perceived to be physically smaller than Jekyll; they even recommend the book to patients and families to offer insight and understanding for those needing treatment for drug dependence or addiction.

In other words, according to some contemporary thinking, the misfortunes of the good Dr Jekyll all arose simply because he liked to dabble in hallucinogenic drugs - and just look where that got him: the beast within unleashed; dangerous to others and destructive to himself. A modern morality tale if ever we heard one."

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Now take a look at our full Jekyll guide.

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