Over the summer the drums beat ever louder, announcing the publication of the seventh and last Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows and the arrival of the newest Harry Potter movie, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. In this context, it is useful for psychoanalysts to understand what makes Harry Potter so popular. Why has this character and his story captured such fevered attention from children, and even adults, around the globe?
A writer for the Washington Post suggested that the magic of wizards holds fascination for children today because they have grown up in a world of technological gadgets that work in mysterious ways. And, of course, a good plot keeps everyone on his or her toes. However, in addition to the sheer fun of a good story, I think it is the way that Harry's adventures provide a forum to play out universal childhood emotional conflicts that make them particularly compelling to so many readers.
In an era of terrorism, when we are all subjected to visions of suicide bombers and wars, inner conflicts are often intensified. This is particularly salient for children who have fewer resources to master such conflicts. For example, when learning about death and destruction in the real world, a child who has successfully mastered a wish to hurt a rival sibling or parent may fear excessively for the safety of that also loved sibling or parent.
Child analysts have long known that fairy tales and imaginary villains play an important role in helping children master inner demons. Harry Potter's adventures are modern-day fairy tales that engage the reader because they describe a struggle to master emotions that we have all experienced growing up. Young children imagine scenes (sometimes like those in Harry's wizard world) that embellish or change the everyday world outside. These scenes reflect the child's struggle to contain anger about disappointed wishes as well as rivalrous and jealous feelings towards siblings, parents, and others. The child often masters such difficult feelings through fantasies that transform his or her helpless rage into images of heroic conquest over obstacles and enemies. Even when mastered, such feelings resurface at times of stress, such as parental divorce, at important junctures in development, like the onset of puberty, or when dangers such as warfare and color-coded terror threats are omnipresent in daily news and adult conversations.
For the child analyst, the child therapist, the parent, or the school consultant books can provide an avenue into the emotional world of children and adolescents. The young person's inner struggle is much like Harry's struggle with the dark Lord Voldemort. For those who don't know the story, Harry's parents were killed during his childhood. After living with adoptive parents who mistreat him, he is rescued and transported to a school for wizards where he finds friends, bullies, mentors, and a range of loved and hated teachers. He also fights the intrusions of Voldemort, the evil wizard who killed Harry's parents. Analysts will recognize the universal adoption fantasy, understood by Arthur Levine (the publisher who brought Harry Potter books to America), who said, “I wasn't neglected. I didn't sleep in a cupboard under the stairs….that doesn't mean I didn't feel invisible and didn't feel powerless and I didn't have the fantasy that I would be recognized someday. This is something we all share.”
Like the young child, Harry's battle is often more emotional than physical: His enemies gain power through his fears and other vulnerabilities and lose power when he is able to master his feelings, memories, and wishes. Harry's core strength comes from the love of his mother, who died defending him. J.K. Rowling seems to know what psychoanalysts have long known about child development: Loving care during early childhood provides core strength that helps us master later trauma and stress.
Like Harry, Voldemort lost his mother at an early age and found his first real home in Hogwarts School for wizards. But unlike Harry, he became a loner and allowed his rivalries to rule him. In the sixth book, Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince, Harry's mentor, the wizard Dumbledore, took Harry on a tour of some of Voldemort's important developmental crossroads, showing Harry how his nemesis turned away from people and towards a quest for power and immortality. Voldemort's quest led him to commit acts that cemented his evil character.
Judith Chertoff, M.D., practices adult and child psychotherapy and psychoanalysis in North Bethesda, Md. She is a training and supervising analyst at the Baltimore Washington Center for Psychoanalysis (), and affiliated with the Jenny Waelder Hall Nursery School in Washington, D.C.
Throughout all the Harry Potter books, Harry is beset with his own jealous feelings, but he remains open to friends and mentors who help him master them so that he can grow in resilience. Harry, too, has wounds, due to the loss of his parents, that can be reopened. Like many of us, he needs to understand his vulnerabilities in order to gain the upper hand with those who play upon his hatreds, anger, and other dark emotions. For example, in the first few books, Harry learned that the fear and coldness he experienced in the presence of prison guards, called “dementors,” was because of their ability to revive feelings and fears from his past: With them he experienced the cold loneliness he felt after his parents' death.
In the fifth book, most recently made into a movie, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Harry began to dream that he was Voldemort. Professor Snape was assigned to help him explore his mind in order to master those feelings that made him vulnerable to this dark lord. When Snape began to remember troubling feelings from his own childhood—a time when Harry's father teased Snape mercilessly—he became more hurtful than helpful. Harry fled their sessions and Snape avoided Harry. Although Harry ultimately prevailed, he suffered greatly as a result of the vulnerabilities he and Snape could not address.
While the movie Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix is better than some of the others, movies don't allow as much room as books for a child's own imagination. The Harry Potter movies rarely capture fully the resonance of villains with the inner struggles of Harry and his friends. They are therefore not a very good introduction for those who have not yet read the books.
As Harry has grown in the course of the series, he has struggled with adolescent rivalries and crushes. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows has hallmarks of a coming of age saga: Harry struggles with disillusionment with the wizard Dumbledore, his idealized parent substitute, and alternately yields and resists his tie to Voldemort's inner life, which is characterized by rage, destructiveness, and the quest for power. His struggles resemble the adolescent inner struggle to develop an independent identity, often characterized by denigrating idealized parental figures and periods of narcissistic self-investment alternating with depression and despair. This is a struggle we psychoanalysts often see in our patients when they regress at times of crisis or have not sufficiently mastered inner forces and past experiences. They, too, need to find a way to love themselves and others despite imperfections and the realities of trauma and loss. Although Rowling gets carried away (Hollywood style) by battles among wizards as the book goes on, she ultimately makes clear the nature of Harry's struggle as an inner one and shows us the ultimate fate of such a struggle in maturity.