In this episode, JF and Phil discuss Robert Louis Stevenson’s Gothic classic, the tale that conjured the fog-shrouded London hellscape that has haunted the modern imagination ever since. Though written as a quick “Christmas crawler” to earn a bit of money, the novella has exerted an incalculable influence on art and literature. It also proved strangely prophetic, anticipating Freud and others who would soon make the fragmentation of the human psyche a defining concern of the new century.

"The human is two" is a recurring refrain in the work of the scholar of religious thought, Jeffrey J. Kripal.

References

Dan Ericson, Severance

Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

David Lynch (dir.), Mullholland Drive

John Frankenheimer (dir.), The Manchurian Candidate

Galen Strawson, British philosopher

Juan Eduardo Cirlot, A Dictionary of Symbols

Jeff Kripal, How to Think Philosophically

Rouben Mamoullian (dir.), Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Weird Studies, Episode 161 on “From Hell”

Sigmund Freud, “The Ego and the Id”