The Psychology of Harry Potter

For the last couple of months I've been reading M. Scott Peck's book The Road Less Traveled. I've been "deliberately" reading it slowly and thinking a great deal about it as I've been going along. In fact I've mostly been reading it on trains and 'buses, not to mention whilst waiting for them. And whether deliberately or not I have probably assimilated more of it than I woud have if I'd just sat down and read it straight through. And perhaps too I've benefited from reading it this way!

Most of what Peck has to say is actually very good. As a highly decorated military psychiatrist, his interest is very much on the "real world" rather than with fanciful theorising. Almost all of what he has to say is very interesting. There are only one or two bum notes, such as when he refers to himself and his own experience of "growing up" by funking prep school. His take on religion is somewhat disappointing - though according to his website he has taken a good deal more interest in his own religion (he's a sort of non-denominational, C S Lewis-type "Christian") since he wrote the book back in the 1970s. And there are one or two claims he tries to make that are just plain wrong. (For example, western society is not psychologically healthier now than it was in the 1950s, or, one imagines, than it was in the '70s, when he was writing. Quite the reverse, in fact, as Oliver James, for example, has been at pains to point out.) But all-in-all it is well worth reading.

I think I would particularly recommend this book for any "non-religious" person who is nevertheless still interested in spiritual growth - and indeed for anyone who has been let down by the modern Catholic Church (Ahem!) or who is simply ready to accept that "religion" only provides the tools and the starting point for spiritual growth and does not in and of itself cause the soul to open and expand. Prayer and the Sacraments, after all, are essential, but spiritual combat can only take place in the real world. If one confines one's spiritual efforts to the chapel and the confessional then either one must stay there twenty-four hours a day or one is lost.

I think it would be fair to say Peck takes a Jungian attitude to myth. His own, slightly idiosyncratic reinterpretations of Biblical passages are fairly grating. But he does make use of Buddhist and indeed classical myths in a way that is intelligent and engaging.

Perhaps the most important myth in his thesaurus is that of Orestes, which he refers to in the book's final chapter. A few years ago, various corners of the Internet were buzzing with all sorts of views about what the Harry Potter books were really all about. One of the most delightfully dotty theories I came across was that the Harry Potter stories were actually based on the Oresteia (of Aeschylus and, more generally, others as well). According to this theory, the character of Harry Potter himself was based on the hero Orestes, Ron was Pylades, and Hermione was, well, Hermione. This, by the way, was round about the time when one could find slashy fanfic out there (and some of it really was and is very "out there") for just about any coupling between any two characters in the Harry Potter universe one could think of. And it was said that J K Rowling herself, who was certainly no slouch at engaging with Internet-based fandom, was not a little perturbed by some of what was, er, "coming out".

For me the most wonderful thing about Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows when it finally hit the shelves was discovering all the little scores that Rowling settles with her readers (not to mention her critics) in its pages. The book opens with a thank-you message to the fans who have been following Harry's adventures from the beginning - written, with not a little charm, in a "Carolingian" "mouse-tail" meter copied from Alice. Although officially the eponymous Deathly Hallows themselves are Voldemort's horcruxes, the thematic crux of the book is Harry's visit, long foreseen by fans, to his parents' "hallows" on Christmas Eve in Godric's Hollow. The inscriptions on their graves act as a gentle but powerful riposte to those who over the years have accused the Harry Potter books of being un-Christian. So too, in fact, is the scene with the Sword of Godric Gryffindor, guiding Harry to one of the horcruxes by its light in the shape of a cross. (Funnily enough, the hug that Harry gives Ron after the horcrux is destroyed rather suggests that even the slash-fic writers were not entirely missed from Rowling's thank-you list.)

The thematic significance of the scene in Godric's Hollow though is perhaps really brought out by the book's frontispiece quotation from The Libation Bearers (the only such frontispiece in any of the books, thus giving this one, the last in the series, a definite sense of being more "grown-up" than its precursors). The conclusion, that the scene in Godric's Hollow is Rowling's own version of the scene the quotation is taken from, and that Harry really is Rowling's Orestes, is hard to avoid. Harry and Hermione aren't actually carrying libations, nor are they actually brother and sister - though, as Harry later confesses to Ron, that is very much the nature of their relationship. But in general terms the two scenes are analagous. Moreover it is also hard to avoid the probability that J K Rowling, herself a classicist by education, knew exactly what she was doing.

Is the real point then of the Harry Potter books a psychological one - that it is only when we confront our demons and take responsbility for ourselves that we can conquer them, at the same time, nay at the very instant that we finally achieve full spiritual adulthood? It is when Orestes takes responsibility for his own actions, rather than blaming them on the curse that has been placed on his family the House of Atreus, that the gods take pity on him and revoke their curse. The Furies then become the Eumenides, the Kindly Ones, and the hero is spiritually healed. Similarly it is only when Harry finally takes up his personal responsibility for destroying the Dark Lord, and indeed when he stops being merely a pawn in Albus Dumbledore's (somewhat obscure) masterplan, that Voldemort, himself very much the embodiment of schizophrenic mental illness, is defeated and banished forever.

Obviously there's always a danger that one can read too much into popular stories, not to mention popular children's books and indeed all myths and fairy-stories. But it's just as possible, and more unfortunate, to read too little into these things, and given the huge success of the Harry Potter franchise it is probably worthwhile giving the boy-wizard and his world at least a passing thought along the way.