Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, II: We All Have our Vices
Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was written by Robert Louis Stevenson in England in 1885. The story showcases how a person’s immediate desires and life goals tend to contradict each other at times, often in wildly dark ways. But being a good person does not mean ignoring the monsters we face.
Dr. Jekyll is a respected and pious English physician who despises his sinful desires and seeks to separate them from his respectable identity. Instead, he creates Mr. Hyde, a separate identity through which he can indulge his darkest impulses without his usual conscience or sense of responsibility.
At first, Jekyll believes he has found a way to satisfy these desires without allowing them to interfere with his respectable life. By transforming into Hyde, he can indulge impulses he would never allow himself to act upon as Jekyll and then return to his normal life with little immediate consequence. However, each time Jekyll indulges himself by becoming Hyde, he reinforces the very behavior he hopes to keep separate from himself.
What begins as a conscious choice to indulge a vice can eventually become a pattern that makes the next indulgence easier. Behaviors that provide immediate gratification are especially likely to be repeated because the brain learns to associate them with that reward, strengthening the neural pathways involved in the behavior. Each repetition makes the behavior more familiar and natural to return to, while resisting it requires the person to work against a pathway that has already been strengthened. Jekyll initially believes that he can simply choose when to become Hyde, but every indulgence makes that choice less his own.
Which explains why addiction can persist even when a person genuinely wants to stop. The problem is no longer simply whether the person knows that the behavior is harmful; the behavior has become a deeply established response to immediate gratification. The longer it is indulged, the greater the conflict can become between immediate gratification and the life a person actually wants. Jekyll eventually reaches this point: he recognizes that Hyde is destroying the life he wants to preserve, yet the pattern he created continues to pull him toward exactly what he wants to escape. The more he gives himself over to Hyde, the more he damages the relationships, reputation, and future that the respectable Jekyll values.
Jekyll's tragedy is not that he has destructive desires, but that he repeatedly sacrifices his future for the sake of satisfying them in the present. Every indulgence appears to give him greater freedom because he can temporarily escape the restrictions of his respectable identity, but those same choices gradually restrict the life he will be able to live later. His attempts to keep Hyde separate from himself only allow the problem to grow unchecked, until the distinction between choosing Hyde and becoming Hyde begins to disappear. A vice that was once something Jekyll could choose to indulge in has become something that increasingly chooses for him.
But if repeated indulgence can eventually undermine a person's conscious control over his own behavior, what happens when the mind continues working toward something even when the conscious self is trying to resist it?
Jekyll experiences this loss of conscious control most clearly when he tries to sleep. After realizing the danger Hyde poses, Jekyll attempts to resist the transformations and return to the respectable life he once had. But even when he is no longer deliberately choosing to become Hyde, he discovers that he cannot just escape him. When Jekyll falls asleep, he finds himself transforming into Hyde without making the conscious decision to do so. This is significant because sleep removes much of the deliberate control Jekyll has relied on to keep Hyde separate from his better half. While awake, Jekyll can reason through the consequences of his actions and tell himself that he should resist Hyde. In sleep, however, the mind does not operate in exactly the same way. The conscious reasoning that helps a person control impulses and work toward long-term goals becomes less dominant, allowing other thoughts, emotions, and patterns to continue working beneath conscious awareness. Jekyll's inability to remain himself while asleep therefore reveals how deeply Hyde has become connected to the parts of his mind that he cannot simply control through conscious choice.
When Jekyll is awake, he can use reason to recognize the danger Hyde poses and make the decision to resist him. When he falls asleep, however, that deliberate control becomes less dominant, while the brain continues processing thoughts, emotions, and experiences from the day. The prefrontal cortex, which helps with planning, decision-making, and controlling impulses, is less active during sleep than it is while a person is awake. This allows the brain to process information in a different way, making connections that do not always follow the clear logic of waking thought. Jordan Peterson describes a similar process in Maps of Meaning, explaining that the right hemisphere is especially involved in creating images and patterns when a person encounters something uncertain. He connects this kind of thinking to dreams, stories, and myths, suggesting that the mind can work with ideas and emotions before they are fully organized into conscious, logical knowledge (68–72). Jekyll's transformations during sleep can therefore be understood as more than a failure of willpower. The part of his mind that he has repeatedly trained to seek Hyde's immediate gratification does not simply disappear when his conscious mind goes to sleep.
If Hyde does not disappear when Jekyll's conscious control changes, then Hyde was never truly a separate person. Jekyll created Hyde as a way to separate his desires from the identity he wanted others to see, but the desires themselves still belonged to him. He argues that the mind can contain patterns and emotional knowledge that are not yet organized into conscious, logical thought, and that dreams can reveal some of what is already present beneath conscious awareness (68–73). Jekyll's transformation during sleep suggests something similar: Hyde is not an outside force taking control of him, but a part of Jekyll that he deliberately strengthened and then tried to deny. The more Jekyll separates Hyde from his respectable identity, the less able he becomes to recognize that Hyde is still himself.
Jekyll's solution was never going to be simply eliminating the parts of himself he considered unacceptable. A person can have anger, jealousy, selfishness, or even the desire to hurt someone without acting on those impulses. Being good does not mean becoming incapable of destructive thoughts; it means recognizing them and choosing not to obey them. Jekyll instead tries to escape responsibility for his darker desires by giving them a separate identity, allowing Hyde to pursue immediate gratification while Jekyll preserves the life he values. But a person cannot build a good life by repeatedly sacrificing the future for the sake of the present. Long-term choices require considering not only what feels good now, but what a decision will do to one's relationships, responsibilities, reputation, and freedom later. Jekyll's attempt to separate these parts of himself ultimately leaves him unable to control either one.
Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde ultimately shows that the darker parts of human nature cannot simply be separated from the rest of the self. Jekyll feeds his destructive desires through repeated indulgence, strengthening a pattern that eventually begins to operate beyond his conscious control. When he sleeps and transforms into Hyde without choosing to do so, he discovers that what he tried to make separate was never truly separate at all. His mistake was not simply having destructive impulses, but believing he could indulge them without becoming responsible for what they made him. A person does not become good by pretending the monster is not there. Life's goal is to recognize that the monster is possible, keep it under control, and choose not to feed it.
Work Cited
Peterson, Jordan B. Maps of Meaning. New York, Routledge, 1999, pp. 68-73.
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