Dr. Jekyll, a highly regarded London physician, succeeds in developing a drug in his laboratory, which separates the different personality parts of man from one another. In a self-experiment, he wants to study the consequences of such a split of personality. But his experiment has a different effect than originally intended. More and more he loses control, and Mr. Hyde, the hidden, dark part of Jekyll himself, is increasingly getting stronger.
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"(The Strange Case of) Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" is a novel by the Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894). The book was published in the English original in 1886, the first German edition in 1889. Another famous work of Stevenson is the adventure novel "Treasure Island".
The story of the scientist who, with the help of a serum, tries to separate the good and the evil in man in a self-experiment is one of the most famous literary forms of the doppelganger motif. Partially, psychoanalytic theories were used to interpret the narrative. In the sense of Freud’s psychoanalysis, the ego finds no stable center between the Es (Mr. Hyde) and the so-called Über-Ich (Dr. Jekyll) in this story. And Analytical Psychology by C. G. Jung sees in the two title figures the archetypes of the persona and of the shadow. Mr. Hyde also seems to have an infective effect on others, even if he is not acting. His mere presence already means an attack on the strength of the psyche of others.
This edition is decorated with illustrations by Charles Raymond Macauley (1871-1934). The eBook corresponds to about 130 book pages.