Jekyll & Hyde on stage

This past Sunday afternoon, I attended the live stage performance of "Jeykll & Hyde" at the Clark Center for the Performing Arts in Arroyo Grande, CA, produced by Chameleon Productions, an apt title for this performance. The story, by Robert Louis Stevenson, is a classic story of the duality of good and evil in human beings. While it is fiction, I have learned that scriptwriters and other artists have often understood human nature better than we psychiatrists and other mental health professionals. This story is NOT about a case of MPD or DID, but is one which is based on the possibility of an evil psychic entity being created by the ingestion of a powerful chemical. Personally, I don't know if there is any chemical which can do what is shown in this play all by itself, but the idea is a powerful one to make us think seriously about the subject.

Since I had not read this story before, or seen the play or movie, I watched the drama unfold, with powerful stage settings and magnificent vocal renditions. The lead character is a medical doctor named Dr. Henry Jekell, who is doing research in a conservative hospital. The program states, "Convinced the cure for his father's mental illness lies in the separation of man's evil nature from his good, Dr. Henry Jekyll unwittingly unleashes his own dark side, wreaking havoc in the streets of late 19th century London as the savage, maniacal Edward Hyde."

Dr. Jeckell goes before the Board of Governors of St. Jude's Hospital to plead for permission to use a human subject in his experiment. He has concocted a chemical which he thinks will separate the evil self from the good self in a human, and thus he might remove the evil from the good, benefiting all mankind. The Board turns him down and he then decides to secretly use himself as the human subject. [For those who are interested in the methods of pharmacological research, this is a major error in procedure. To do a safe experiment, one must have three persons involved in the experiment (or in the religious ritual, or in medical treatment). One is the person to take the drug, one who can be able to report on the effects accurately. The next person must be the pharmacist or chemist who guarantees a pure drug is being used. The last one is the doctor or experimenter (or religious leader) who decides how much drug to give and is responsible for the safety of the the human subject. In this story, all roles were played by only one man, so failure of the experiment was guaranteed.]

At the same time, Dr. Jekyll is engaged to be married to a lovely woman, the daughter of his best sponsor and mentor. He also goes out on the town with his best friend, who is an observer of the events to unfold, and they visit a local watering hole frequented by prostitutes. One of them, Lucy, is most attractive to Dr. Jekyll, as she is the prototypical "prostitute with a soft heart." He gives her his business card in case she ever needs medical help.

When he takes the dangerous potion, he loses control of his body and it is taken over by a monstrous Henry Hyde, who loves to kill people. He starts with those on the Board of Governors which turned down Dr. Jekyll's request, and then starts killing off one actor after another.

Hyde meets often with Lucy, who fancies herself as one gal who can take care of herself. But Hyde assaults her and she then goes to see Dr. Jekyll for treatment of her bruises. Dr. Jekyll does not have any memory of having been in her bedroom as Edward Hyde, of course. After he treats her wounds, he kisses her before she leaves his laboratory. Lucy then sings a powerful song of how she must be worth something because she has a doctor in love with her.

However, at the next visit to her bed by Hyde, he slits Lucy's throat and kills her. Then he has gone way over the edge in just being evil to those who were critical of Dr. Jekyll, and Dr. Jekyll thinks he can control this powerful "killing machine" inside him. He then marries his fiancee, and on his wedding day, he loses control and Hyde takes over in front of all his friends. Hyde then tries to kill his bride, Emma, and a great tussle ensues. Dr. Jekyll's best friend, John, finally shoots Hyde with a pistol Dr. Jekyll had handy for suicide, and he dies in the arms of his bride. The curtain finally comes down for the last time.

If anyone is wondering whether or not this is a fictional case of MPD or DID, let me assure them that IT IS NOT. It is more like the case of Ken Bianchi, one of the LA Hillside Stranglers, whom I saw for his own murder trial. Ken was a nice enough guy to have around, but his "Steve Walker" was a killer of prostitutes and those other women he chose to rape and kill. We had quite a intellectual battle as to whether or not he was a "multiple" and my final conclusion was that he was not one. He had not created any real alter-personalities (which are designed for self protection and survival), but he had used his emotional imagination to create Internalized Imaginary Companions or IIC. One of these was created in response to his mother's very odd and irritating behavior toward him, and so wanted to kill woman, after raping them.

In this drama, we have no indication of such a bad mental attitude towards women by Dr. Jekyll, so we have no psychological basis for his creating this monster with his own imagination. I can't think of a way any chemical can make de nova a mental entity with desires, goal making abilities, and social attributes of any kind. However, I did see one man for court evaluation who exhibited several different IIC, which he mentally created in childhood because of sexual abuse by his mother and sister. Two of his IIC were woman and two of them were men. But they only came out when he was intoxicated with liquor. When he was in jail and sober, then never showed up. So, if Dr. Jekyll had made an IIC in his boyhood, the chemical he brewed could be an intoxicant which allowed them to show themselves in adulthood. This is what happens with such dissociating drugs as alcohol and sleeping pills.

There is also the question of whether or not there is inherent evil in every human being, as is implied in this story. Obviously Carl Jung seemed to think so, as he taught that each of us has a "shadow side." In my multiples, I looked at all kinds of "sides" and never found a "shadow side." I did find a lot of angry alters, who were angry at specific adults in the person's past who had abused them. But is anger the same as being evil? I think not.

In my education on how the Essence works with the person's Emotional Self (or ego or personality), the Essence is nonemotional. But it can develop some very bad attitudes, by which it becomes a "turned Essence." Then it can lead the Emotional self into hating innocent people and doing harm to them. An evil entity wants to destroy someone he is angry at, not just yell and scream at them. He may want to destroy their ability to earn a living, or take away what is most valuable to them. This is a whole package of intentions, none of them good to have. It is a lot more than just being angry. Such turned Essences cannot be "unturned" by psychotherapy, which is aimed at the Emotional Self. Only after they leave this mortal coil in death can they be rehabilitated in the other universe I call Thoughtspace. So, in the terms of this story, the death of Dr. Jekyll was the only proper result, when his body had come under the control of something so evil that it succeeded in killing a woman who was kind to him, the prostitute, and then tried to kill Emma, his new wife, who loved him through all of this. There is no way he could have been rehabilitated in this physical world. In Thoughtspace, the forces for good were available, at no cost to him or the state, for as long as all eternity.