Lab Notes
Hyde in Plain Syte

You have evil thoughts. Don't try to deny it! You may not have been thinking anything particularly wicked before you started reading this article, but thanks to my prompting you're probably about to start. It's OK. It's human nature. Just let it come. Heh.

Now imagine what could happen if those thoughts were directly connected to your actions, with no filtering or buffering or sense of moderation. Such was the inspiration for Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the seminal novella penned in 1886 by Robert Louis Stevenson. In the story, a shy, retiring scientist concocts a potion that turns him intermittently into, um, a very different person. Symbolizing the repressed desires of the human subconscious, Mr. Hyde seems to have no trace of empathy, very little impulse control and zero respect for the laws and customs of society. He simply takes what he wants from the world around him. Whee! And yet, despite being hairy and somewhat misshapen, he's no animal; with snappy dress and an acid tongue, he's as human as any of us. Just selfish and crude, quick to anger and even quicker to act on it. That kind of freedom is seductive, too; Jekyll eventually becomes addicted to the Hyde persona and loses the ability to control his transformation.

This story—among the most famous ever published in the English language—has been committed to film no fewer than 56 times (including at least three musicals) and has inspired hundreds—perhaps thousands—of other books, movies, comics, radio programs, etc. Given all that, one might well wonder why the BBC aired an updated six-episode revival this year, starring James Nesbitt as the 21st century's Dr. Tom Jackman, and the lively, deadly, decidedly creepy Hyde alter-ego, and the historical Dr. Henry Jekyll (ancestor to Jackman), and the historical Edward Hyde. It's quite a role, but Nesbitt and "the Beeb" pull it off with panache. Between them, directors Matt Lipsey and Douglass McKinnon have more than 30 years' experience producing edgy British TV shows, and they clearly know what they're doing. The writing is by executive producer Steven Moffat, best known to American audiences for his work on the new Doctor Who and for his brilliant comedy series Coupling (sadly bought out and ruined a few years ago by NBC).

This time around, the good doctor is determined to gain control over his dark side until a secret society reveals he's part of a centuries-long, Bene Gesserit-style experiment. What's all this then? Well, it's a hush-hush, unsympathetic, above-the-law kind of group, and Hyde—not Jackman!—is the one they want. It's a modern, blackly humorous twist on an old story, and the tension is cranked high throughout.

Diagnosing a timeless disorder

In some ways, the tragedy of Jekyll is easy to update, because its themes are primal and timeless. Jekyll and Hyde are archetypes and serve as the template for modern equivalents like the Dark Side of the Force, which (like any addiction) transforms and corrupts the people who dabble in its power and finally turns them into permanent monsters. Hyde is also, in a way, the inspiration for the stereotypical slasher-movie villains now coming back into vogue. Relentless, remorseless, vaguely supernatural. ... You can't reason with Mr. Hyde, but you can die at his hand if you're in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Of course, Stevenson did not invent Hyde in a cultural or literary vacuum. Lycanthropy myths—the idea that humans can literally or metaphorically turn into dangerous animals—date back at least as far as ancient Greece. Similarly, the Roman Janus—god of beginnings, patron of the month of January—had two faces, one clean-shaven and the other bearded—and, like the yin and yang of Asian tradition, has long been regarded as a symbol of the duality of human nature. Also, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein—another tale of mad science creating evil in the search for greater good—had been kicking around in the global zeitgeist for almost 70 years by that time. And finally, the Victorian world certainly had its share of ill-behaved drunks and addicts who, upon the return of sobriety, looked back in horror at their behavior. These almost certainly had some influence on the story of Jekyll; we all battle our dark sides every day, just usually not in such an overt manner.

It's important to note that the science of psychology was unknown to Stevenson at the time he wrote the story. In fact, the word itself made its first appearance in the Encyclopedia Britannica in the same year the novella was published, and the first stab (so to speak) at the art of psychoanalysis would not be made until the following decade, when Sigmund Freud hung out his couch and shingle. However, the novel was prophetic in many ways, and numerous attempts have been made since then to analyze Jekyll and Hyde in modern psychological terms.

Under the schizophrenia or "fractured mind" diagnosis, Hyde's impulsiveness is simply an attack of disorganized thinking in the ailing brain of Dr. Jekyll. Others have suggested bipolar disorder, with Hyde representing the manic phase and Jekyll the depressive. I think that's a bit insulting to the scientists of the world, though. Conversely, the left brain/right brain dichotomy, with Jekyll being the logical left brain and Hyde the creative right, is insulting to artists. Anyway, the clinical details aren't really a close fit for any of these.

Most armchair critics agree that Jekyll suffers from multiple personality disorder or MPD, also known as Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) or simply "split personality." With this particular ailment, the mind cleaves into two or more completely separate identities, each with its own personality and memories that may or may not overlap. It's an oft-disputed diagnosis, which only about 80 percent of the world's psychiatrists actually believe in, but it's part of a family known as "dissociative disorders," whose existence is not disputed. Of the tens of thousands of reported cases of MPD, could 100 percent of the victims be faking? Or misdiagnosed from another disorder? If you ask me, anyone who claims multiple personalities, and who has nothing to gain by saying so, has clearly got something wrong in the ol' Gulliver.

(I'll say the same thing about alien abductees: Most of them clearly have suffered a weird and traumatic experience, if only in their own minds. In fact, I don't really believe in hypochondria of any sort. Most people have enough problems in their lives without inventing imaginary ones, and for the attention-starved losers who feel the need to fake it, well, that's Munchausen syndrome—a legitimate psychological illness in its own right. Anyway, most computers are capable of running two or more programs simultaneously, and I don't see why the memory and identity centers of the human brain should be any different. And finally, I'll note that brain scans have shown patterns of activity shift dramatically when an MPD patient claims to be under the control of a subordinate personality. That's hardly conclusive, but it is highly suggestive. So in spite of the doubts surrounding MPD, I'm inclined to think it's a real problem, albeit a rare one.)

Was Jekyll a junky?

I don't want to spoil the story by spilling the details of Jekyll's modern formula, but in a general sense, are there drugs in the modern pharmacopoeia that could induce this state? The first and most obvious candidate is the male steroid hormone testosterone, widely known for causing not only the growth of muscles and body hair, but also feelings of lust, rage, competitiveness and (ahem!) inflated self-importance. The street drug phencyclidine—popularly known as PCP or angel dust—causes violently manic behavior and reduced pain sensation, and also a psychotic/dissociative state that matches some of the passages in Stevenson's book. Angel dust endures in the body for weeks, and with heavy abuse it can also cause a type of brain damage that makes some of its effects permanent. Could Dr. Jekyll simply have been the world's first PCP addict?

Other dissociative drugs include the animal tranquilizer ketamine, the anesthetic nitrous oxide (aka laughing gas) and, in large doses, the cough suppressant dextromethorphan. Stevenson also described Jekyll's formula as "a salt," which could describe either PCP or dextromethorphan. Researchers have even found one chemical—the blood pressure medication propranolol—that can accomplish the science-fictional trick of deleting specific (usually traumatic) memories—even one single memory!—while leaving other memories intact. No kidding. Still, to match the book exactly we'd need a cocktail of different chemicals—steroids and dissociatives, stimulants and amnesiogenics, and maybe some peptides and memory RNA to adjust the victim's mood just so. Doable? Yes, definitely. Desirable? No way. Of course, love is also a drug, and has been known to cause some very bad behavior indeed. 'Nuff said.

In fact, the only thing I find implausible about BBC's Jekyll is a new invention of Steven Moffatt's: Mr. Hyde has total, photographic recall not of everything that's ever happened to him, and also everything that ever happened to Jackman, Jekyll and the original Edward Hyde. Let's think about that for a moment. Even of these memories could somehow be encoded and transmitted across the generations, a low-def digital TV signal eats up 6 million bits per second. Multiply that by the two billion seconds in an average human life, and we're talking about roughly 1.6 quadrillion bytes of data, or a stack of DVDs 83 meters high. Even if Hyde's gray matter could store all that, the problems of indexing and searching it all would be formidable indeed!

Still, it's a debatable point, and a fascinating way to round out the first season of this pleasantly surprising new show. I find myself willing to suspend disbelief, and eager to find out what 2008 will bring. Now if you'll excuse me, there's a test tube I need to drink from ...

Sources:
Lilienfeld, Scott O.: "Hoax and Reality: The Bizarre World of Multiple Personality Disorder," Skeptical Inquirer, November-December, 1998

Dunn, G.E., Paolo, A.M., Ryan, J.J., & Van-Fleet, J.N.: "Belief in the existence of multiple personality disorder among psychologists and psychiatrists," Journal of Clinical Psychology, 1994

Davis, Michael: "Incongruous Compounds: Re-reading Jekyll and Hyde and Late-Victorian Psychology," Journal of Victorian Culture, Edinburgh University Press, Autumn 2006

Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org): "Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde", "Dissociative Identity Disorder", "Munchausen Syndrome", "Phencyclidine"

The Internet Movie Database (www.imdb.com): Jekyll

Encyclopedia Britannica 2006 Ultimate Reference Suite: "Multiple Personality," "Janus," "Lycanthropy"

Gray, Richard: "Scientists find drug to banish bad memories," The Telegraph, 07 January 2007