Hello, I’m Wang Fang.

In 1886, more than a decade before Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, Robert Louis Stevenson dreamed of a criminal who swallowed a powder and became unrecognizable. The good, diligent Dr. Jekyll transformed into the cruel Mr. Hyde, whose evil grew uncontrollable.

Stevenson made the dream into Jekyll and Hyde. Its variants include The Nutty Professor, the Hulk emerging from Bruce Banner, Frodo tempted by the Ring, and Harry Potter disturbed by darkness. One person divided into light and dark, someday possessed by evil, has become a cultural motif. When someone says they suddenly became another person or felt possessed, we recognize it. Jung would call a story archetypal when it touches a universal aspect of humanity and feels true.

Each of us is Jekyll and Hyde: a bright mask worn daily and a dark self kept silent. Greed, anger, envy, and lies hide beneath the socially adapted ego. Jung described two archetypes: persona and shadow.”（shadow）。

First, the persona. We play social roles, and environments constrain outward expression. Persona is the public personality presented to meet social and cultural expectations. It enables adaptation, reputation, recognition, and even makes us identifiable to others.

Yet the persona partly deceives others: what they see is you but not all of you. When we mistake that fragment for the whole, we deceive ourselves too.Thus everyone wears a mask, but some still answer to their own name while others have taken the mask’s name. Excessive external attention sacrifices the genuine inner self. Jung treated overidentification with persona as a source of psychological illness.

Many patients are victims of an inflated persona.They may be highly successful yet find life empty, lonely, and meaningless. In therapy, often in middle age, they discover their feelings and interests were performances of enthusiasm for things they never truly cared about.