Mr. Hyde
There are many ways to look at the story The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson. One way to look at it is that it is about man's ongoing struggle between good and evil. When he is Dr. Jekyll, he is a decent human being, whereas Mr. Hyde is a bloodthirsty monster. The approach that I like to take to the story, since I am a psychology major, is that it is really an exploration of the human mind, making Dr. Jekyll the civilized person and Mr. Hyde the barbaric animalistic side of a person. According to Sigmund Freud, the human mind is divided up into 3 areas, the sections that are governed pleasure, morality, and the area that tries to find the common ground between the two. Dr. Jekyll is governed by the third area, while Hyde is controlled by pleasure, in other words not at all. Hyde is the end result of what happens to man when you strip away all rules, consequences and restraints that have been put on him by society. He just does what he wants without any second thoughts, no hesitations and no regard for what might happen to him or what the effects will be on others. I like this approach to Hyde because it brings to light a very disturbing idea: Hyde lives in all of us. And again, it's not that we all have an evil personality waiting to unleash hell on the world, it just means that we all have that animalistic side to us. So really, the potion didn't change Dr. Jekyll or make him a different man, it just stripped away any regard that he had for rules, morality and society.
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