Freud’s Personality Theory in Literature

Literature is a wide field in which it includes many genres, subjects and styles. A literature work can consist of many subtitles, also such as historical and scientific knowledge as well as critic, satire and etc. Many of the literature works that we assume as successful in fact deal with more than only one subtext. Either a historical reference or a scientific knowledge has been placed in it. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde or The Portrait of Dorian Gray are only two of the above mentioned sub texted works. Both Robert Louis Stevenson and Oscar Wilde witness Freud’s life and studies and they make use of his theories in their successful works. Freud’s personality theory in which includes three drives of our conscious is obviously observed in both works.

Sigmund Freud, a famous neurologist living between 1856 and 1939, worked over psychoanalysis during his life and separated the human conscious into three drives which are controlling and shaping our behaviours from birth to death. Freud believed that personality has three structure; the id, the ego and the superego. “Superficially, Freud's functional discrimination seems to repeat Plato's. The id is the agency of bodily desires, the ego the mediating function, and the super-ego has the care of moral prohibitions.”(Rieff173) The id is Freudian structure of personality that consists of instincts, which are an individual’s reservoir of psychic energy. We are born with the id and it residues within the unconsciousness. It functions according to pleasure principle in that it seeks to maximize pleasure and minimize any discomfort. It is illogical and in search of only pleasure without thought to what is practical, safe or moral. The ego, unlike the id, functions according to the reality principle and represents reality to a considerable extent, reason. “In other words, the double becomes this outward manifestation of the unconscious.”(Guedes30) This period begins in the third year of life and during the toddlerhood, particularly during toilet training; children come to realize that they are individuals. The ego is called the executive branch of personality because it uses reasoning to make decisions. The id and the ego have no morality. They never take into account whether something is right or wrong.

The last and moral part of the psyche is the superego. We begin to learn about the rules, norms and values of society at the age of five of six and the children internalize these rules to form the superego with functions as a very strict conscience. “The superego corresponds in many respects to conscience and from it are derived religion, morality and a social sense.” (Riviere644) In a healthy person, Freud asserts that the ego is the strongest one so that it can satisfy the needs of id, not upset the superego and still take into consideration the reality of every situation. It is not an easy job by any means, since if the id gets too strong, impulses and self-gratification take over the person’s life and if the superego becomes too strong, the person would be driven by rigid morals and be unbending in his or her interactions with the world.

The case of the characters of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in Robert Louis Stevenson’s book can be shown as examples to somehow excessiveness of Freudian personality theory. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde with Stevenson’s sayings; Hence it came about that I concealed my pleasures; and that when I reached years of reflection, and began to look round me and take stock of my progress and position in the world, I stood already committed to a profound duplicity of me.(Stevenson49) The two characters of the novella are but one; one body two conflicting characters, the good and evil as we can count as the representatives of the id and superego according to the theory of Freud. While Dr. Jekyll is behaving totally with his superego that has all the values of society, Mr. Hyde represents the id, evil unleashed and does all the criminal acts; even commit murder without fear of any apprehension. He is constantly fighting with himself between god and evil. He drinks a potion which he made that transforms him into his evil side, Edward Hyde. Dr. Jekyll holds in his cruel emotions and is a friendly person but when he turns into Mr. Hyde, he becomes a demon and lets out all his emotions. Dr. Jekyll who seems to have total control over himself is the representative of superego, but when he drinks potion voluntarily, he turns into Mr. Hyde, the id, who is a cruel person. Model TASK: Stevenson explores ideas about repression 1. Read the model. in Victorian England through the characters Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. During the final 2. Read through the mark scheme, chapter, Dr Jekyll’s Full Statement on the paying close attention to AO3. Case, Jekyll describes himself as developing 3. Give the response two stars and a a “furious propensity to ill”. He admits to his dark side becoming stronger almost like a wish. habit, as he describes it as a “vice”. This 4. Give the writer a tip on how they “propensity” to do bad things and be more can gain more marks from AO3. like Hyde shows how this way of behaving 5. Continue the response. feels natural to Jekyll. This may show that although Jekyll understands that his actions are wrong, he cannot help indulging in the desires he has. Stevenson may be trying to show that overly repressing our natural feelings can only lead to negativity – if we don’t allow ourselves to be ourselves then something will have to give, in this case the brutal violence of Hyde. This could link to Freud’s theory of personality in which the id is the instinctive side that lives within us all and that doesn’t think of the consequences, Hyde is a pure form of the id. However, Freud also believed that the ego and super-ego exist to regulate the instinctive side of us by introducing rules and morals. Jekyll uses Hyde as a way of allowing himself to act on instinct as he feels restrained by the rules of his time.