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The Harry Potter series is about mental illness.  Hogwarts is a mental institution. 

Bear with me.  I'll explain. 

I watched the fifth Harry Potter movie this weekend.  The series is wildly successful, one of the most successful of all time, and I am interested in understanding why these mega-hits appear from time to time.

As I watched this installment, it became clear to me that the entire Harry Potter series is an extended metaphor -- a coded transcription, really -- about a boy with severe mental illness, suffering from delusions.  Everything depicted in the movie can be interpreted as a recitation (from his delusional perspective) of his attempts to cope with the harsh realities of his confinement in a mental institution. 

Here's my thesis: Every major event in the books is a fantasy/delusional version of the experiences that a child would encounter in the course of being institutionalized and forcibly treated for mental illness. 

When Stef reviewed the Twilight series in one of his podcasts, I was inspired to go back and look at a lot of popular books and movies and interpret them in a new light.  In short, my theory is that most (if not all) of the most popular boks and movies of all time are constructed as a kind of double-fantasy -- the reader and author understand and implicitly agree that the subject matter of the book or movie is not real, but on another level, the events in these stories are also constructed as a fantasy or delusion of the protagonist himself. 

Typically, the opening act of this kind of story takes place in the real world.  Then, something happens that sends the hero into a new world, where the usual rules of the hero's former life do not apply.  In supernatural-based storylines, this is where the first non-empirical, magical event occurs. 

In the real-world portion of these stories, the protagonist typically experiences some form of psycholoigcal trauma, notably in the form of humiliation, rejection or social isolation.  The hero finds himself to be anonymous, abandoned, dumped, or socially subordinated in some extreme way.  Luke Skywalker is told he can't leave the farm.  Dorothy is told to stay out of the way of the grown-ups, while her dog is about to be killed.  Nick Carraway of the Great Gatsby finds that he is incapable of intimacy, and feels like a fraud among the New York elite.  The narrator in Fight Club is literally anonymous, and lives in corporate hell.  Peter Parker and Clark Kent are bullied relentlessly. 

Then, some outside agency comes along and empowers the hero to respond to these traumas.  The resulting heroism is always the exact opposite of the earlier powerlessness, rejection or humiliation.  Freud called this type of story a "family romance," in which a young hero imagines his primary care-takers to be mere substitutes for his real parents, who are dead or otherwise out of the picture, but are of a higher social class than his foster parents. 

In the Harry Potter series, his parents are famous wizards, who were famous in all the world for their unparalleled love for the boy Harry, which set the whole series in motion, killing them and leaving the boy a scarred orphan. (This is a fantasy, crafted as the direct opposite of the way in which children usually end up scarred -- through abuse and neglect.)

If we interpret the story as Harry's fantasy, then the Dursleys are Harry's real parents, and the Potters are imaginary.  The Durselys either can't cope with the increasingly-delusional boy living with them, or perhaps they are merely abusive, and it's the abuse that's making him delusional.  In any event, the parent-figures constantly mistreat him, favor the brother, and inflict endless cruelty and humiliation on him.  One day, Harry snaps, and Dudley (who is really Harry's brother) is severely injured, in a way requiring repeated hospital treatments.  (In the delusion, Harry imagines that a pig's tail is magically grown from Dudley's buttocks.)  As a result of this incident, Harry is taken away to a "special school."

My theory is that this story line is a coded explication of a delusional boy that is starting to engage in violent outbursts, and is sent to a mental institution as a result.  Everything that happens after that becomes increasingly detached from reality, and what we see, as the audience, is his delusion, which is a re-casting of his institutionalization experience into a kind of adventure.

I believe there is a great deal of evidence in the text for this hypothesis.  Mental illness is featured just about everywhere in the series, and the theme of insanity is very prominent.  Classic features of mental illness, such as delusions, paranoia and multiple-personality disorders become increasingly more important to the story line.  Here are a few examples: 

• The first book features Harry at his new "school," becoming obsessed with a mirror, where he spends endless days imagining his perfect parents (of course, they are dead, which is a metaphor for saying they are wholly imaginary).  Dumbledore, the paragon of surrogate love, warns Harry that the mirror has driven people insane, because spending all your time in fantasy causes you to become unmoored to the real world.  (This is exactly what happens to Harry for the rest of the series.) 
• The school is locked.  It is also filled with random, insane dangers that everyone accepts as perfectly normal -- moving stairs, talking paintings, deadly monsters roaming around outside. Mental prisons are dangerous places where crazy situations are, in fact, ordinary. 
  
• Sirius Black is Harry's godfather, and is overtly insane.
  
• In the 4th book, Black is closely affiliated with (and introduced by and treated as a kind of surrogate for) a werewolf, who is obessesed with the moon.  The moon is a symbol for insanity (i.e., lunacy).
• The Goblet of Fire contest pits students against each other in contests that are openly life-threatening, which is what students at a school for violent, mentally-disturbed children experience on a regular basis.  
• The clean-cut Derek Diggery (a fantasy image of the popular, successful boy Harry could have been were it not for his mental problems) is murdered by "Voldemort," who is Harry's alter ego and the projection of his rage and fury.  Harry is the only one who sees this event, and no one believes it was "Voldemort."  This event is a metaphor for Harry murdering a boy who is too perfect, despised for having the life of love and ease that Harry wanted, but never got.  So, he imagines that "Voldemort" did it.  When no one believes him, it's an unspoken metaphor for the fact that everyone knows Harry is the murderer. 
• If the murder of Derk Diggery is not meant to be a real event, but entirely imaginary in Harry's mind, then the murder of the normal boy is a metaphor for Harry losing his final chance at a normal life. 
  
• This "murder" takes place in a maze where the main danger is being psychologically possessed and going insane. 
  
• Harry is helped in this unwanted fight to the death by "Mad Eye" Moody, who is also openly insane.  To compound the insanity of this parent-surrogate, Moody is not actually the real Moody, but an imposter, who is even more openly insane. 
• Book Five opens with Harry again attacking his brother/cousin Dudley, leaving him traumatized.  Periodically, Harry returns to civilian life, but finds that he can't go five minutes without a seriously violent, delusional episode. 
  
• This incident was interpreted by Harry as an attack by "Dementors" who cannot be seen by normal people.  This incident causes Harry to appear before a board of inquiry to determine if he is too violent for Hogwarts, the alternative being Azkaban (i.e., a more harsh mental prison).
• Azkaban is heavily associated with insanity.  In the story, it is said that inmates go crazy within days of arriving, which is a metaphor for saying that it is a high-security prison for violent mental patients.  It is where Black and Lestrange (and others) went off the rails. 
  
• It is also in the fifth book and movie that we meet Black's cousin Beatrix LeStrange, who is also openly insane. She murders the insane Sirius Black just as he is becoming more stable and normal. This is a metaphor for the violently delusional side of Harry's mind defeating and suppressing the side that might have healed. 
  
• Harry's newest friend at school is Luna Lovegood, whose name is another reference to lunacy, and is openly known to be crazy, and is the only other student who can see Harry's delusions, even within the context of an otherwise crazy place like Hogwarts. 
• Another "class" mate, Neville Longbottom, the forelorn loser, is revealed to have a family history of mental illness -- parents who are mental patients, having been driven insane by Beatrix. 
• Repeated references are made to "Voldemort" being so evil that he drives his victims crazy with torture, rather than merely killing them. 
• It is repeatedly indicated that the boy "Tom Riddle" (the young "Voldemort") is actually Harry Potter, with constant parallels and similarities being heavily stressed.  Same books, same wand, both orphaned, etc.  Harry has increasing visions of Voldemort, and they even share thoughts, which is an obvious symbol for saying that "Voldemort" is just a component of Harry's diseased mind, at first only a whisper, and becoming increasingly dominant and thus real to him. 
• In the 6th (or 7th?) book, I believe Rowling tried to tell us what she was really writng about -- there is a flashback scene where Dumbledore first meets "Voldemort," as a boy.  Dumbledore comes to rescue the boy (who is really Riddle/Harry) from abuse and poverty.  When Dumbledore says he has come to take him to a special school for kids with his kind of needs, Riddle's first response is that he knows Hogwarts is an insane anylum, and he doesn't want to go. 

After I watched the movie, I suspected that the author, J.K. Rowling might have had some family or personal experience with childhood mental issues or institutionalization, and that her Harry Potter series was a way for her to talk about them in a safe way.

I did some quick searching about her online.  I couldn't find any reference to any institutionalization experiences in her childhood, although I did find this: she donates heavily to two causes -- multiple sclerosis, which was her mother's cause of death, and has gone to great lengths to fund an organization called Lumos, described as follows:

We want to end the systematic institutionalisation of children across Europe. We want to see children living in safe, caring environments. We believe this should be the case for all children, whether they’re disabled, from an ethnic minority or from an impoverished background.

We know our vision is ambitious. We understand that removing children from institutions isn’t – in itself – enough. We must work with governments, policy makers and practitioners to enable children to grow up in a family-type setting.

Here's a quote from the author on the subject:

Hi Magnus,

I just wanted to say that I enjoyed reading your post and think you have some interesting insights into the themes on these books. Unfortunately I don't have much to add, or to give critique too, as I haven't read the books and have only seen the first 2 movies. A very interesting thesis though. I have saved it for future reference. I look forward to seeing what others have to say, and also seeing if you develop this further.

Good job!

Dave 

Magnus, would you post your Theory on my website theoriosity.com, click the submit button at the top of the page. It's a website I started for people to publish their theories on various topics and I think yours would be perfect! Just make sure to post it in the form of a question rather than statement so - What is Harry Potter Really About? I explain why in the intro video =)

Let me know what you think and I'll respond to your theory tomorrow =)

goosebumps. brilliant. me think more.

Your theory sounds awfully good.

two name corrections it's Cedric Diggery not Dirk and Bellatrix not Beatrix. 

One thing that stands out in the order of the pheonix (5th book?) that professor Umbridge becomes more hated and in many ways more evil and sadistic than Voldemort. not to mention that she conspires against him by sending the Dementors.

I think you could expand on the idea further. like what about the Weasleys and Hermione. Hermione is an interesting case because her parents are completely normal, but not abusive like the Dursleys.

This was a truly superb review, thanks so much for posting. 

Holy crap. Mind blown.

Thanks, everyone, for the enthusiastic responses. 

Considering how dense about people and relationships as I am, I am continually surprised by what I find out there in the world after I fully accepted the basic proposition that there is no magic.  For most of my life, the social bullshit narratives that we are fed ruled my way of thinking (e.g., statism, social organization, mysticism, etc.)  As a result, things usually made no sense, and I spent most of my young life very confused.  I've been studying narrative forms and literary interpretation for as long as I can remember (it was my mother's main activity), but only through rational empiricism can you ever really see what's going on. 

Stories can't really be about magic, and magic all by itself is not actually interesting to people. So, I have to conclude that stories that rely on magic (or anything extraordinary that's beyond plausible experience) must therefore be about something else.  Magic must be a metaphor for something that's meaningful to people.  Usually, magic is a metaphor for the power to resist some otherwise overwhelming force, or a way to overcome anonymity, or it's a feeling of being "cursed" with unwanted knowledge or experiences.  But here, I believe it's primarily a metaphor for Harry Potter's retreat to a safe place, into a prefereable, imaginary setting to get away from a terrifying, abusive environment. 

I put a lot of stock in Alice Miller's basic thesis about child abuse, particularly as expressed in her book The Drama of the Gifted Child.  The word "gifted" is not used here to mean specially intelligent or musically talented, but instead refers to the child that finds a way to appease abusive parents, to suppress his natural anger, and repress his natural needs in order to survive.  That's where all the psychological mechanisms that flow from deficient parenting come from -- they're a survival mechanism.

The first chapter of the first Harry Potter book is called "The Boy Who Lived." 

I'd love to post this on your site, Ricky, but it looks like a video-oriented site, am I right?  I need to clean up the post a lot, I see on second reading, but if your theory-based site is geared toward text, I'm all for it. 

As for Ron and Hermione, I don't really know off-hand how they'd fit into this interpretation, other than to say that they are either intended to be fellow residents of the institution, or they are imaginary in Harry's mind.  I tend to think they are real (to Harry), since the characters that are likely to be wholly delusional are the ones that are especially magical or are larger than life, like Hagrid, the giant who lives outside the normal grounds, and who has no real relationship with anyone other than Harry.  That strikes me as a fantasy of Harry.  The people and events that tend to take place outside the normal school-world, I believe, are delusional. 

I believe the author once said that Hermione Granger was essentially herself.  Ron Weasley is notable because he seems to be so deeply embedded in the magical world that it's totally normal to him, as one would expect for a middle child where all the older children have already been through the system. 

A lot of times, authors will simply give main characters side-kicks, so that they have someone to talk to, so we (the audience) can overhear their conversations about what they think, expect and feel.  Otherwise, that information has to be given to the reader in the form of straight exposition or as interior monologue, which doesn't play as well in the movies.

Interesting angle!  I would try to put forth this analysis to a mainstream Potter fan crowd and see if it has legs there.  These ways of looking at stories rarely come up within those groups. 

I have considered some of the points raised myself, such as how incredibly dangerous the whole magic world is for Harry and everyone else.  But I hadn't considered the mental illness angle, although the notion of fantasy characters being parts of the main character's mind remind me of The Wizard Of Oz and American McGee's Alice.  (I am not sure if the Lewis Caroll book is about mental illness or not, I thought it was political satire, but the game was certainly about mental illness)

I'm not sure why, but I was absolutely terrified as I read this thread. I'll think on it for awhile and be back later.

nathanm:

I would try to put forth this analysis to a mainstream Potter fan crowd and see if it has legs there.  These ways of looking at stories rarely come up within those groups. 

I don't know if that's a good idea!  Some people want to live inside a self-contained fantasy world.  That's what Harry Potter does, after all, according to my interpretation.  I suspect that a lot of those devoted fans are devoted for that very reason -- they personally relate to the idea of using a seamless fantasy as a means of wiithdrawing from a reality they find intolerable. 

My wife is a Harry Potter fan, and has read the books several times each, and listened to them all on audiobook a dozen times or more.  (She's a novelist -- she reads a lot.)  I instinctively know that she would find this theory extremely off-putting.

I think it would be kind of like approaching a group of very serious Christians and floating the idea that "God" is just a projection of their own abuse-derived grandiosity, or that prayer is a misperception of how their own unconscious mind works.  I think the most likely reaction would be hostility.  And I've provoked enough of that for one lifetime, unfortunately.

I enjoyed reading this, quite a brilliant analysis.

I don't think it's necessarily threatening.  If you put it in terms of "Here's another way of looking at the story" rather than "This is what I honestly think the plot of the story IS." then it is simply just an interpretation.  I think the mainstream fans are concerned with the internal series of events and not any overarching themes .  I don't suspect there will be a big reveal that It Was All Just A Dream at the end of the story, but I don't know - if I read the books I'd probably know the ending, but I just watch the movies.  I suspect there will be yet another Voldemort End Boss level as there usually is.

Although I can't say that philosophical analysis does not have drawbacks.  Certainly listening to Stef's movie reviews have sapped my ability to suspend disbelief.  Entertainment is very difficult when one's mind is overrun with metaphorical thoughts.  But it's not just him, it also happens with the more movies you see.  The thematic stuff starts to become more obvious.

Reply to Magnus:

I am a devoted fan of the Harry Potter books and I must say that the idea of the story being about a mentally injured child fits in quite well. Take for example the fact that (SPOILER btw) in order to kill Voldemort, Harry must first kill the next-to-last piece of Voldemort's soul, which is inside him. So he can finally kill Voldemort when Voldemort is no longer a part of him.

It isn't easy for me to admit it, but I did have a rather bad childhood and the Harry Potter books helped me a lot. I wanted to live inside that fantasy when I grew up, but now when I am grown up I can almost entirely accept that it was just a fantasy and I can keep myself to the real world instead. You are right when you say that some people want to live inside a fantasy, but I think it is important to make these people aware of the truth so that they can start recovering from their problems. Imaginary friends can only hide your problems, they can't cure them.

Because of this thread I decided to look something up in the last Harry Potter book. I remembered a few lines that might be worth mentioning (especially since it is in the end of the last book). Here is the exakt quote (SPOILER obviously):

'Tell me one last thing' said Harry. 'Is this real? Or has this been happening inside my head?' [...] 'Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?'