Psychoanalytical Reading of Dualities in R. L. Stevenson´s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Chuck Palahniuk´s Fight Club

Abstract

This Master’s thesis conducts a comparative psychoanalytical reading of Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club. By applying Jungian and Freudian frameworks, the research explores how the protagonists’ fragmented identities reflect the repression of the self. The study contextualises Jekyll’s struggle within the Victorian “cult of respectability” and Fight Club narrator’s fracture within the late-20th-century hyper consumerism. Ultimately, the thesis demonstrates that when societal expectations fundamentally oppose human nature, the resulting intrapsychic conflict leads to the catastrophic and inevitable destruction of the individual.