Jungian Archetypes and Character Motivations in Harry Potter

Looking at Harry Potter with a Jungian psychoanalytic perspective can, to some, seem a little overly critical and sometimes "reaching for straws," but as one can see on closer inspection, Jung's character archetypes are alive and well providing Rowling's characters and events with motivation and her characters with "character." If it weren't for Carl Jung's archetypes, the characters in Rowling's series would have little definition and no clear way to be fully understood. The villains would simply be villains and no one would know why. The heroes would be heroes, but for nothing more tangible than simply being called a hero. What would a hero or a villain even be without a standard from which to base one's analysis? Harry Potter's relationship with Albus Dumbledore, Harry's mentor and headmaster at school, would seem less important and strong than it truly is without looking at it scrutinizingly, and Rowling herself would seem to have chosen to end her series on book seven arbitrarily rather than allowing the psychological power of the number and thematic elements run rampant in exactly the way Jung lays out. Though touted as children's and juvenile reading level novels, one can certainly see there is much more to Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry than a beginning reader could ever understand.

Carl Jung, a Swiss psychologist who lived at the turn of the 20^th century, originated a list of psychological archetypes ("universal images that have existed since the remotest times") that provide insight into the collective unconscious, "a storehouse of knowledge, experiences, and images of the human race" (Dobie 56). Jung's list of archetypes are varied, but consist partially of the Hero, the Wise Old Man, the Devil, the Scapegoat, the Trickster, and the Outcast which will be discussed later, as well as a few others which play more minor roles in humanity's psyches and literature's more prolific characters.