Psychoanalytic Research of Personality Development on the Example of Harry Potter

"Harry Potter" is a phrase almost every person with access to a television or library has heard, and most of those who have heard it also know what the phrase means and who the name belongs to. A circulation of 500 million, over 1 million words, 25 hours and 6 minutes of uninterrupted viewing of all parts of the franchise - the scale is truly staggering. As we read the books and watch the movies, we admire Harry's bravery, his kindness and courage, his self-sacrifice. But do we wonder how he has developed the values he demonstrates? Do we think about how a young man who lost his parents and grew up in a closet under the stairs learned to be a friend and to love? In this paper we propose to look at Harry's story through the prism of psychoanalysis. The relevance of the research is conditioned, firstly, by the absence of complete and structured works on this topic, secondly, by the possibility to demonstrate the application of psychoanalysis on the material of popular literature, which is perceived mainly as entertaining, and thirdly, by the desire to demonstrate that every event can be viewed through the prism of psychoanalysis and reveal many interesting, useful and non-obvious aspects that explain people's behavior, their decisions and actions. Thus, the purpose of this study was to analyze the development of Harry Potter's personality. In order to achieve this goal, key stages of personality development and factors influencing development were identified; in particular, the concepts of trauma were formulated and the consequences of trauma for personality development were determined. The empirical material, representing all 7 Harry Potter books, was examined through the prism of the aforementioned theoretical concepts. As a result of the study, the hypotheses formulated at the beginning of the work were confirmed: the experience a person faced in infancy and childhood is not determinative for the rest of life, but can be lived, worked through and integrated; the key importance in the development of personality is society and external circumstances.