Harry Potter and the Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder Counselor
POOR HARRY! J. K. ROWLING TRULY SUBSCRIBES TO THE EDICT THAT A GOOD BOOK IS ONE IN WHICH YOU CREATE CHARACTERS THAT THE READERS LOVE AND IDENTIFY WITH—THEN DROP A MOUNTAIN ON THEM. OR, IN THE CASE OF POOR HARRY, AN ENTIRE MOUNTAIN RANGE.
And then, without warning, Harry’s scar exploded with pain. It was agony such as he had never felt in all his life. . . .
—HARRY POTTER AND THE GOBLET OF FIRE
This was the worst he had ever felt.
—HARRY POTTER AND THE CHAMBER OF SECRETS
I LOVE THE HARRY POTTER BOOKS. I want to establish that, first and foremost. I have all of them, and I began my reading of them with a certain amount of skepticism (something that popular can’t be that good) and read each new one with the same eager anticipation as a member of the audience for whom it is intended. I even own the Hats—Sorting, Madam Hooch’s and Professor McGonagall’s.
However, I am also an adult writer of fantasy . . . and as such, I can no longer simply read something without the little critic in the back of my head going, “You must be joking.” Most of the folks in my household are the same way . . . which is why one evening in a fit of lunacy, we invented the “Harry Potter Drinking Game.”
Now you probably know what a drinking game is—an exercise designed to lure you into consuming more alcohol than is good for you, on the basis of the occurrence of an event that seems as if it will occur with less frequency than it actually does.
So, here it is—and may Joanne Rowling forgive me for it.
Whenever Harry responds to a long and complicated question with a monosyllabic “Yeah,” take a drink.
On the surface of it, this really does appear to be a major flaw. But I’ve since spent some time eavesdropping on teenage boys.
They actually do this. That is, when they respond at all. Very often the long and complicated question is greeted with silence, rolling eyes, a sigh or all three.
So while this is still justifiably part of the drinking game, score one for Rowling for getting it right.
Whenever Harry’s anatomy spontaneously rearranges itself, such as his heart making scenic migrations to various parts of his body like his feet and his throat, take a drink.
All right. We all do this. We have phrases we overuse. Mine used to be, “He looked like someone had hit him in the back of the head with a board.” But when they occur often enough to become part of a drinking game—
Critic One, Rowling One.
On a side note, we include in this part of the game the signature phrase, “He felt a small jerk behind his navel.” We would like to know (this is the household, not the royal “we”) just who this small jerk is and what he is doing behind Harry’s navel.
This brings me to the final part of the game.
Whenever Harry experiences “the worst pain ever felt in his life,” take a drink.
Now, this made me stop and think.
We as writers are basically in the business of inflicting trauma on our characters, and Harry comes in for far more than his share when compared to, say, the average boarding-school pupil. Hence the title of this essay: after the events of only the first book, a normal kid would be seeing a shrink, and we’re not done yet. We begin the first book with Harry living in a profoundly abusive situation. He spends most of the time when he’s not acting as an indentured servant, living in a closet full of spiders under the stairs. The child in me is shivering with sympathetic schadenfreude. The adult and writer in me is going, Where the heck is Child Welfare? The Dursleys are patently not fit to raise a poodle; didn’t anyone in the wizarding community check these people out before delivering a helpless kid into their hands? And surely, if they can deliver letters and even parcels by owl, they could and should have been checking up on him.
For that matter, what about the Muggle community? Teachers are supposed to be trained to watch kids for signs of abuse. You would think that a competent teacher would have seen the signs of abuse in Harry before the boy got out of second grade.
In the later books, we get a flimsy explanation about the nature of the magic protecting him, and for the critical adult, it just feels like an afterthought. The adult is not convinced.
But there is a long tradition in English literature of putting children in awful situations for the sake of the story. Even in children’s books. Roald Dahl was the past master at this sort of plot—James and the Giant Peach, for instance—and before the Harry Potter (and now Lemony Snicket) books came out, one could make the case that he had pretty much cornered the modern market on the abuse of young children for the sake of a story.
The tradition goes back a lot further, of course. The Victorians loved this sort of plot, and the use of it ranges from the best (Oliver Twist, for instance) to maudlin little tracts in which an unrealistically good child suffers unspeakable abuse and remains good, often dying in the end and going to heaven.
However, Roald Dahl’s books are fantasy and have an obviously fantastic setting, and Dickens is in the past, where unspeakable abuse to children wasn’t given the attention it is now, but in this day and age, abuse like that should not have escaped the eye of teachers and fellow students. And in fact, in the case of dumping infant Harry with these patently awful people, an adult is often left wondering: What were they thinking? Rowling One, Critic Two, I think, so far as an adult reader having trouble suspending disbelief in the Dreadful Dursleys goes.
However, this is not the sort of thing that would make young Harry a candidate for a PTSD counselor. Not yet, anyway.
Now, having one of your favorite teachers turn out to be a literally two-faced monster, controlled by the creature that murdered your parents—
That would make anyone eligible for PTSD counseling.
But by this time, of course, we are well into the fantasy portion of the plot, and it is a lot easier for the adult reader to simply fall into the story. Rowling Two, Nitpicky Critic Two.
By book two, Harry is well into the realms of stresses that would make anyone crack. He’s sent back to the Dursleys and on return for his second year finds himself the focus of a whispering campaign by the denizens of House Slytherin, which—even without the trauma—is grounds for paranoia and a persecution complex besides.
Once again, Fussy Critic raises her ugly head. The adult disconnect here is this: Slytherin harbors more malcontents than a Russian bar when the vodka has run out, and has been the breeding ground for Lord Voldemort and all his Death Eaters, and still Hogwarts allows it to remain.
Anyone sane would have disbanded the House, sent them all away and turned the place into a series of storage closets.
Not Dumbledore. The adult reader is left wondering if he is suffering from a mental condition as well. Because if he’s allowing this so that he can keep his eye on them, he’s doing a poor job of it. Rowling Two, Annoying Critic Three.
In the second book, Harry experiences a great many “worst pains he has ever felt in his life.” From encountering lethal fauna and flora to the battle in the Chamber of Secrets, Harry experiences enough trauma to send half a dozen youngsters to a trauma specialist. And by the end of the book Harry is beginning to show signs that he might need one.
But Rowling saves her real one-two punch to Harry’s psyche for book three. First there are the Dementors, and Harry gets a taste of their particular brand of pleasantry early on.
There’s a very interesting theme starting here: the adults you trust (parents) are not always able to save you. It’s a subtle form of trauma that most modern real-world children don’t actually encounter until they are much older than Harry’s thirteen years, unless they have the misfortune to be the victims of abuse or disaster. The simple brush with such helplessness during the destruction of the World Trade Center, whether experienced live or on television, sent youngsters all over the country to counselors and therapists.
However, fictional (and real-world) adolescents of the past were sadly all too familiar with that helplessness. From the waifs laboring in “dark satanic mills” to the children of British expatriates sent “home” to the indifferent or cruel attentions of paid guardians or boarding schools, from Kipling to Kingsley, the books (and the world) were full of it. Rowling joins a very long line of authors in that tradition, and if fewer children these days are familiar with that world-shattering helplessness, nevertheless, fictional or as a reflection of reality, it’s a viable theme.
Still. Harry does come in for more than his share of it.
And by book four, the poor lad ought to be a raving lunatic. The bloom is off the rose for poor Harry. No longer the darling of the wizarding world, no longer subject to contempt and persecution only at the hands of one House of his fellow students, by book four more adults than just Lord Voldemort and his Death Eaters have set their sights on him, and they lay down a barrage of withering fire.
Now in this case, Nitpicking Critic has to concede to Rowling. A great deal of this rings true, and even Harry’s age doesn’t negate it. All you have to do is pick up a supermarket tabloid to see the same sort being given to treatment of media child-stars. The wonder of it is that Harry hasn’t got as many PTSD counselors on his payroll as young actors do. Rowling Three, Obnoxious Critic Three.
And this, of course, is the book where Harry gets the real kick between the eyes, because this is the book in which someone dies—is murdered, in fact—right in front of him. It has, of course, been said repeatedly that Lord Voldemort and the Death Eaters have killed people, but Harry has never seen it for himself.
Now here is where the Irritating Critic is divided. On the one hand, you could make the case that Harry ought to have been driven into some sort of mental state by the shock. But on the other hand, you could also point out that all of his angst up until this point has conditioned him to handle it. People have almost died in his presence, and those were his friends. It’s not as if he really knows Cedric all that well. Still, one envisions years of therapy thanks to this, and at least one therapist’s high-dollar sports car.
All of this is, of course, merely the warm-up for book five, which features a genuine sadist and the death of Harry’s guardian and link to his dead parents, Sirius Black.
And book six—where Dumbledore himself is murdered.
And at this point Nattering Critic simply has to shut up, and presume that Harry is repressing all this. There’s plenty of precedent for that in the real and fictional worlds, too. That’s why it’s called Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.
Somewhere, out there in the fictional world of Harry Potter, there’s a PTSD counselor avidly reading the wizarding papers, rubbing his hands and thinking happily of how he’ll be able to pay the college fees for his kids once all of this comes back to haunt the Boy Who Lived.
In high school, MERCEDES LACKEY was the goalkeeper for the Highland Flingers Quidditch team, which held the record for the most consecutive losses of any team in the state of Indiana. This is partly explained by the fact that they were forced to practice at night with no lights to avoid the attention of the local Muggles.
She is the author of The Fairy Godmother, the Elemental Masters series, the Heralds of Valdemar series, the Diana Tregarde series and many others, all of which the Muggles seem to think are fantasies.