Pychology in Harry Potter and a 3-4-5 chiasm

Intro

I’ve been writing a fair bit about psychology recently (Interstellar, Story Time 2, Tolkien’s imagination). I have written some the content of this post before, especially on Muggle Matters, about the role of psychology in the Harry Potter series, and I thought it would be good in this new era of thinking and writing for me (post Muggle Matters, post closing of the canon of the Harry Potter heptology [seven-book series), post grad school) to collect all of my material on the matter into one more organized place.

Two clinical psychologists named Kim Decina and Joselle Vanderhooft gave paper at Lumos in 2006 in Las Vegas when I was there (I am pretty sure I have their names right, but I would need to find the CD ROM with their paper presentation on it … I will be bringing them up again more prominently below), and they prefaced their paper on psychology in HP by drawing attention to the fact that JKR is on record as twice going through clinical depression episode, once with the death of her mother and once with the divorce of her first marriage.

I hope that I am not crossing any lines with bringing that up, pointing out too much somebody else’s struggle, and so I will try to balance it out by revealing that I have done my own share of time in the chair (although not the couch, which I have heard from friends is a very different experience … disembodied voice of the interlocutor kind of thing). I bring it all up for the same reasons they did, which is to say that it fits as a theme in Harry Potter because it is one that would be near to her heart and she would likely there discover and have some exposure to the DSM IV (although now it’s the DSM V).

With the heavy presence I will describe below, I am sure others have noticed this and covered this territory themselves long before me. But, to the best of my memory, everything I am bringing up here I noticed on my own, particularly the material on talk therapy in book 5, which has just sort of been jumping off the page at me, and even more heavily than before, in re-listening to book 5 while driving recently (so, I guess more jumping out of the speakers at me).

3-4-5 Chiasm: 

Dementors and Psychology

My heaviest, or at least most concise, writing on psychology in the Harry Potter series began with writing about a 3-4-5 chiasm of the dementors (for background on chiasm in Harry Potter, see Merlin’s Chiasm Claims and the post on layeredchiasm in Harry Potter). In Prisoner of Azkaban, we are introduced to them, then in Goblet of Fire, we have the only dementor’s kiss to be actually performed in the whole series (on Barty Crouch Jr. at the end of the book), and in Order of the Phoenix, we have an actual dementor attack on a muggle, Dudley (I think the fact that dementors scare even Aunt Petunia in book 5 lends to the concreteness of the chiasm).

(Note: The actual kiss in Goblet is off screen, but unlike in modern drama, this is actually a mark the importance of an event in ancient drama, particularly with events that are so tragic, but in Order of the Phoenix we see it applied similarly to a traumatic event of a “positive” nature: unlike the movie, the book has the kiss with Cho appear offscreen, with Harry only recounting the jumbled experience of the kiss to Ron and Hermione).

I think that the presence of the dementors, and particularly concrete actions by them, can be shown to be pretty distinctive in books 3, 4, and 5, that their level of impact in those books is demonstrably high in a way that justifies the claim that those books are distinct in a focus on dementors (in book 6 we really hear nothing about them other than that they are breeding and that that is causing the mists, and in book 7 we have only occasional run ins in which they have the same general effect already described in book 3 and in which Harry either runs them off with a patronus, negates their effect on him with the resurrection stone’s calling of his parents, Sirius, and Lupin, or simply get out of the area where they are).

In interview material, JKR once gave a direct authorial confirmation of the dementors as the embodiment of despair and depression (I know I have said in other posts, especially Story Time 2, that authorial intent is not the be all and end all in interpreting a work and should not be used dues ex machine, but I think it is demonstrable, as per what I will relate from Decina and Vanderhooft about Harry’s reaction to dementors, that she did a good job of instantiating the theme concretely in the works). This is pretty much straight up psychological concern, and the concrete lines that we drawn well in the books.

Talk Therapy Tropes in Books 3–5

So, there is not one specific element, like dementors, for this, and so it is not properly chiastic, but the prevalence of talk therapy tropes in these books, particularly in book 5, where a variety of these particular tropes are coming heavy and fast, shows that this body of tropes is a particular focus in that trio of books, and that fact connects up with the dementor chiasm to show that psychology is a particular focus of interest in those books.

So, if you have been in the chair or on the couch yourself or have good friends or family who have been and have talked about it honestly with you, you very well may be aware of the metaphor of puking for what happens in sessions where particular “progress” is made (the quote marks are wry; at the time, it sure doesn’t feel like progress … hence the analogy). I bring this one up first because of its presence in book 4 as well. When the truth is brought forth from Barty Crouch Jr. under the influence of veritaserum, after he is done, Mcgonagall is described as looking as if she had just watched somebody being sick.

I think that even the sideline, minor, even fun, elements can contribute to revealing the focus when the author is really trying to make a point of it. And so one of the first candies Fred and George develop for the skiving snackboxes in book 5 is the puking pastille.

There is another trope with a heavy presence at the end of Goblet of Fire as well, and that is the feeling of release in actually speaking the thing. Dumbledore says that, in spite of how worn out and beat up Harry is, he needs to speak about the event so he can begin to process it, and thus accept it, and thus begin to heal. And Harry himself notices that once he has started speaking, it is easier to keep going, to get it all out.

This leads to another trope more specific to book 5, which is the revelatory role of talk therapy. When Harry has those flashes of Voldemort’s strong emotions, he fully uncovers what they were only in telling Ron about them (the statement is usually something like that he hadn’t planned to say that, but in saying it he knew it to be true). Second only to the coping, healing function I just listed, this type of discovery is probably the biggest for talk therapy. Really it is in service of the processing, because you have to find out what it is that you really have to process, which is the effect experiences had on you, and these two (discovery and processing/coping) are the strongest reasons that those who advocate emphasis on talk therapy over against over-reliance on pharmaceutical approaches can give.

Dream analysis is huge in talk therapy. Freud has a whole essay on it. In fact, Harry even does a little bit of real world psychology when thinking about the dream of the department of mysteries hallway when he thinks that it’s not hard to figure out what that one means and ties it to the frustrations he experienced of feeling trapped on Privet Drive at the beginning of the book.

As I said with puking, I think even the sideline elements in the book can play into the focus on psychology, and so the particular topic for divination in book 5 is the interpretation of dreams.

Occulumency is not dreams, but the same thing is going on. The effect of Snape invading Harry’s mind always involves Harry seeing memory’s of particularly traumatic moments, finally throwing Snape off when he gets too near the memory of kissing Cho, or the buried memories of a history of humiliation by the Dursleys. And while occulmency is not dreams, Harry does find himself often more susceptible to the types of dreams that have heralded invasions by Voldemort.

One of those types of dreams, the one involving the Cho kiss that Harry protected so vigorously against Snape’s intrusion, even kicked off the need for the occlumency lessons because it turned into the vision of the snake attacking Mr. Weasely. And that dream retelling was written by someone who has spent time recalling their own dreams with those wild morphing of characters and settings (or at least, I would bet, maybe not my other hand, but at least a couple fingers, based on the details in that recalling, that JKR has done a fair bit of dream analysis).

And that snake attack brings up a psychological trope that is very heavy, that of internalization.  While it’s not specifically a talk therapy trope, I put it here because I am grouping all these things together under this heading as individual tropes … but undoing the rhetoric of internalization is often a project in talk therapy. When Harry gets that dirty, tainted, corrupted feeling from the fact that he was in the snake and says that he was the snake, that is pretty much straight up internalization, the same way that children sometimes assign self-blame for tension between their parents.

I hope that all this shows that psychology, and particularly talk therapy, is pretty much dripping off the pages of book 5.

Harry Potter and Applied Psychology

So, as I said, I heard a paper by two clinical psychologists, Kim Decina and Joselle Vanderhooft, given at Lumos in Vegas in 2006. The main content of that paper was using the DSM IV (Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4^th edition … 5^th edition was not out yet in 2006) to track out particular disorders in characters in the Harry Potter series. For each disorder, the DSM lists a number of behavioral traits and mandates that a certain percentage of them must be observably present for diagnosis: so if, say, nine traits are listed, the presence of at least seven is necessary for diagnosis (episodes can also be included, and, if my impression is correct based on my own investigation of DSM material, they may be weighted more heavily: as an example, diagnosis of bipolar type 1 requires one documented instance of clinical depression episode and one documented instance of manic episode, whereas bipolor type 2 requires one depression and one hypomanic episode). Decina and Vanderhooft traced out Lockart as narcissistic disorder, Snape as disthymic depression, Harry’s response to the dementors as clinical depression episode, and Voldemort as anti-social personality disorder (I know I wrote on Muggles Matters on another Lumos paper that read Voldy as a more debated disorder call malignant narcissist, because Travis Prinzi from the hogshead blog chimed in that he read him as anti-social personality disorder).

I actually wound up dialoguing with Decina and Vanderhooft in a com-thread on Muggle Matters in a post I did on their paper after I got back from the conference. I asked them about Lupin, and they said they had thought about him but could not trace him out to a particular disorder. My response was that I don’t think that specific disorder diagnosis is the only way for psychological emphasis to be applied to a character. I think that, in an issue similar to internalization (here, the internalization of stigma), Lupin represents the self-perception of the diagnosed person. His argument against Tonks’s pressing of him at the end of book 6 is that he is too old, too poor … too broken. In book 7, in the scene in the basement when he asks the trio to take him along (which I didn’t have at my disposal at the time of the conversation with Decina and Vanderhooft), he shows his view of himself as dangerous (“I might pass it to my unborn child”) and debased (“even if I don’t, he is better off without a father of whom he must always be ashamed”) by applying beast language to himself (“my kind don’t usually breed”).

For this one, Lupin, I would even bring in (and I think I may have in a random, sporadic, and at that point ghostly post during grad school at Fordham, but I would have to track down the post) a little bit of my own studies in ancient literature, particularly the use of Stoicism tropes by St Paul (although not in a positive light in the one I would include), which is material that it is quite possible JKR knows of from having been a classics major at Exeter. The name Lupin obviously derives from the Latin word lupus for wolf because of the whole werewolf thing. But this does not keep it from having other associations as well. The stoics believed that all emotion is bad, and they had a little system that showed the four primary bad emotions. But, for three of them, their system showed corresponding virtues into which those emotions could be transformed. The fourth, however, has no possibility of being turned into a positive virtue—it is completely worthless and bad. That emotion is called, in Greek, lupei, and it means psychological anguish, the actual suffering in soul. Paul’s rhetoric against Stoicism comes in the fact that it is precisely lupie that he uses for the suffering of Christ in which he says we should participate (credit where credit is due: this information comes from a doctoral class given by Dr Larry Wellborn on the Corinthian correspondence, 1 and 2 Corinthians). And I also think that JKR very well may have used it for Lupin because he is the psychological anguish of the person who is diagnosed and internalizes the stigmatization.