“With every day, and from both sides of my intelligence, the moral and the intellectual, I thus drew steadily nearer to the truth, by whose partial discovery I have been doomed to such a dreadful shipwreck: that man is not truly one, but truly two.”
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, chapter 10
Even without the context of the book, this quote is able to tell a lot about the character and mental state of Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde. It’s an interesting look into the perspective Jekyll has on his own mentality and what it means for him and others that he isn’t one but two. Through the story, he’s been struggling to accept himself and has hid away Hyde as if he could ignore the problem if he ignored that he shares a body with another.
I’ve heard a lot of people talk about how this book is “a great representation of DID and other similar personality disorders,” but I’d have to argue that it’s much more about the fight between a person’s moral and social standing versus their intrusive thoughts. I think that everyone has a side to themselves that they are ashamed of showing, a side that listens to carnal and instinctual desires – whether they be geared toward pleasure, violence, pain, or anything else – that they wish didn’t exist. Rather than a realistic struggle with dissociative identities, the struggle between Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is a struggle of morality versus anarchy. And this quote cements that for me.
Clearly, not everyone has multiple people in their head sharing their bodies. So, when Jekyll says “that man is not truly one, but truly two,” talking about people in general instead of just himself, he can’t be talking about everyone having another person in their head. This leads me to believe that the plurality of the true being of man is the sometimes conflicting presences of intellect and impulse; good and evil; morality and anarchy; and law and chaos.
