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Annotation by Linda Whitney
The Mystery in the Mirror
I think, therefore I am Me... and Me
I had a friend in college who confided sometime during our sophomore year that her father had come to believe that he was the second coming of Jesus Christ. Not the Christ of the Beatitudes, but the Christ who'd come to slap the pharisees around full-time. Jesus was back and he was irate.
This was the epically tragic mid-life crisis of a high functioning executive who'd been a moderately religious, absolutely loving father and husband, but now had to be constrained by his wife on a daily basis from removing all of his clothes, wrapping himself in a bed sheet and hitting the streets to spread fire and brimstone. His apocalyptic psychosis had come on suddenly and the family was, understandably, in disarray. On occasion he was lucid, and then, in a blink, the Son of God was aflame with the Truth.
Sedating him to the docility of a houseplant for a day or two seemed the only relief. He would then wake up "normal" for a brief time, but would eventually snap back to his delusion with renewed vengeance. All decorative objects had to be removed from every flat surface of the home, walls included, lest they be smashed in a righteous "Cleansing of the Temple" tantrum. The resulting minimalism made my friend's house seem like a model domicile standing in for the real thing. She finally moved to another school in another state to escape the chaos and get her degree where the only unpredictable events occurred at certain frat parties.
This was my first encounter with "split personality," if only second hand. My college girl's imagination tended toward the melodramatic, and I couldn't help giving his second coming claim the benefit of the doubt for a minute or two. Today the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) calls split personality "dissociative identity disorder," but the diagnosis remains a controversial and slippery concept. Some religious doctrines would insist that demon possession is the only explanation and those of a "new age" persuasion might call it channeling. But we are all familiar with the garden variety duality we find in others and ourselves. We each have a sense of our own internal narrative and recognize that it often comes into conflict with the requirements of our external presentation.
Evolving a mature self awareness that works in concert with the impulses of the self-centered "Me" inside is a wrenching process, especially during that crazed second decade of life. Yet most of us survive to develop a matrix of behaviors that will bridge the gap between the shadow self and the one we haul out into the light of day. That subconscious cleft is rarely wide enough to make room for full blown delusion. Instead, we equip it with gestures toward moral mechanisms of peace, love and charity that make civilization possible.
Published in London in 1886, Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is often cited as the original literary exploration of split personality. It is also unique in that it is the first published work to place the conflict within the mind of a single individual, rather not between two separate identities, a protagonist and a counterpoint antagonist. It would be another 15 years before Sigmund Freud published the theories that would bring his view of the mind as a writhing bundle of competing impulses into popular discourse. Stevenson didn't have to concern himself with Freud's definitions of the id, ego, and super-ego, and could weave his yarn instead out of the raw and fundamental fibers of good and evil.
He had already enjoyed great success with Treasure Island and Kidnapped. Jekyll and Hyde would cement his popularity. Because of it's uncharted approach to questions of morality, the book is among the most examined texts in modern literature with a wide spectrum of opinion on its themes. One theory suggests that Stevenson was not so much creating a sensational and prescient popular description of split personality as writing an allegory of a far more common malady: drug and alcohol abuse, rampant among ostensibly mild-mannered Victorians.
Stevenson had suffered poor health since childhood and, while probably not an addict, would have been well acquainted with nineteenth century pharmacopeia. Heroin, cocaine, and laudanum were legal, available and affordable in the late 19th century, not on the street, but at the corner druggist's. Industrial advances had made the production of alcohol, the historical constant in mood modification, ever more accessible. Developments in trade relations with Asia had made the smoking of opium an exotic diversion. Freud himself was a proponent of cocaine as a stimulant, antidepressant and pain-killer and prescribed it freely. At least one patient would never recover from cocaine psychosis, and some theorize today that Freud's own drug habit may have influenced his work, and not in a good way.
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, with its enchanted pills and potions and the fanciful employment of various substances to escape bad situations, could be readily found on bookshelves in tidy parlors of the day. Repressed Victorians in a society ground up by industrialization, imperialism, overcrowding, poverty and crime were self-medicating for pain, both physical and emotional, without much in the way of a societal safety net to dissuade them from, or treat them for, their excesses.
Dr. Jekll's experiments are conducted in secrecy and without scientific precedent. He does not spontaneously turn into Hyde. He takes a drug and a cruel and self-serving persona beyond conscience emerges. His alter-ego pursues gratifications that Jekyll would never sanction. The experiment becomes an addiction. Jekyll comes to prefer the experience of himself that he finds in his amoral phantom identity. Remember that Stevenson was writing at a time when the margins of worthy behavior were clearly defined and hypocrisy was an acceptable byproduct of private transgression. Much like our own time.
Many of us have seen a mild-mannered friend or loved one transform into an unrecognizable malcontent when under the influence, but when blaming alcohol and drugs for all the evils of society, remember that Hitler was a tea-totaller who loved dogs and children. It's a matter of scale. And while this take on Jekyll and Hyde as an allegory of drug abuse is persuasive it ignores a deeper vein of meaning: Dr. Jekyll makes a passage from a simplistic comprehension of human nature through a dark night of the soul and into something more complex and nuanced because of his transgressions. The Jekyll/Hyde paradox becomes instead a parable on the descent of modern humanity into a century of enormous advances in medicine, technology, and living standard against a background of unparalleled violence, exploitation and environmental degradation.
Stevenson died only 8 years after the book was published and could not have known what the 20th century would bring. What he did know was that the moral ground of the planet was shifting and the dearly held belief that mankind was advancing toward perfection was somewhat undercut by actual evidence. The powerful, the well educated and the rich of his day lived well and at the expense of distant poor and enslaved populations just as they do now. The major cities of Europe and America were riddled with crime, corruption and disease. The thoughtful, the well meaning, and the sincerely dedicated individuals and movements were dwarfed by the forces of history made manifest in the greed of industry, the imperial ambitions of nations and the willful ignorance of large segments of the public.
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is the tale of an intelligent and curious man's progress through corporeal appetites resulting in a striving toward the transcendent. It is a study of the all too human attempt we make each day to reconcile our decent selves with our inner megalomaniacs in an age of ambiguity and paradox. Our current cult of celebrity cashes in on surface appeal and throws the value of character under the bus of commerce. Contemporary technologies of interaction devalue sincerity and truth and have generated an atmosphere of cyber-anonymity that allows the craven bully to easily rear the ugly head of cruel digital criticism. Jekyll can hide behind Hyde on the web. What does it mean that kids, at a stage of life given to testing the boundaries of emotional savagery, are exploiting this new opportunity to intimidate their peers? Is this simply a new toy in an age old and transitory arsenal or will it alter the entire trajectory of the development of conscience?
I don't know if modern psychopharmacology could have helped my friend's father then or if it reliably helps with full blown psychosis now and I'll never know the ultimate outcome for this man. Did he, like King George III recover from his madness, or was the trouble finally resolved by institutionalization? And other questions remain: Is the disorder sometimes faked to provide an expedient excuse for bad behavior? Where does personality A go when B kicks in? Is personality really nothing more than a particular soup of neurotransmitters that bubble away inside us and that may, or may not, one day boil over and turn to steam? Or are we an assemblage of mini-personalities, variations on a theme, that manifest themselves one at a time for each person we encounter?
I believe it was the Chilean poet, Pablo Neruda, who said "I am myself and I am also the one who walks beside me". This seems to me a gentle remark on our duality, our condition as being both the observer and the observed, steadying one against the other as we stumble over rocky terrain forever seeking some level high place where balance is possible and visibility is clear for many miles all around. An outcropping where the acknowledgment, embrace and forgiveness of the self is finally possible.
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