A Jungian Archetypical Study of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

8th International Conference on Narrative and Language Studies , Trabzon, Türkiye, 2 - 03 Mayıs 2019, ss.202-207, (Tam Metin Bildiri)

In his genre-defining work The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Robert Louis Stevenson dives into

the uncharted territories of psychology and investigates the duality of the human nature. Stevenson’s attempt to

showcase the two sides of the soul was one of the pioneers for the following works of literature which reflect

the duality of the human nature with split personalities. This approach was also influential because of the

psychological nature of the matter, and Stevenson tackled with this sensitive subject of duality even before some

of the famous scholars of psychoanalysis. The main purpose of this paper is investigating these psychological

aspects of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in the light of Carl Gustav Jung’s theories on “collective unconscious” and

“archetypes”, alongside with producing a general overview of the concept of the unconscious in the novella in

the psychoanalytical and philosophical framework. I argue that the novella has some explicit traits which the

clear manifestations of the Jungian archetypes are, and especially Dr. Jekyll and his alter ego Mr. Hyde are

rather rich in these archetypical features. Aside from the apparent manifestations of two of the four major

archetypes: “the persona” and “the shadow”; Jekyll (and Hyde) bears various distinct patterns of “Magician

archetype” which is one of the twelve main “character archetypes”.