Robert Louis Stevenson wrote The Strange Case of Dr. Hyde in 1886 and ever since, it has been regarded as a classic piece of psychological and horrific suspense. This work deals with the phenomenon of schizophrenia, also known as split personality. The main chareacter in this novel, Jekyll, a brilliant, conservative, respectable doctor who is symbolic of the ideals of society, invents a potion that can separate his repressed evil tendencies from the positive aspects of his personality. When he drinks it, his dark side is fully expressed and he metamorphoses into Hyde, a short, ugly, vicious monster who proceeds to do all the things that the saintly doctor would never think of doing (Stevens 843-859). He then represents all those things prohibited and suppressed by society, such as sex, murder, and vice. .
Encompassing many of the same themes, "Psycho" is a 1960 film that deals with split personalities, as does Stevenson's novel. The main character in this film, Norman Bates, is a schizophrenic man with severe psychological problems. Ten years before, he killed his mother after catching her in bed with her lover. Because of his intense guilt, he refuses to acknowledge his mother's death. He does everything possible to keep the illusion that she is still alive. Bates preserves his mother's body with his taxidermy skills, dresses like his mother, and even carries out conversations with her. As a son, he was intensely jealous when his mother was with another man; as a result, he subconsciously assumes she was equally jealous of him. Therefore, whenever he is attracted to a female, his mother's personality emerges and he murders the girl. In the film "Psycho", Bates is the "Hyde" when he becomes his mother: the ordinarily unconscious, irrational, impulsive side of his personality becomes active, and he becomes "immune to logic, values, and morality" (Hockenbury 364). According to the Freudian theory, this part of the psyche is the id.
