Hogwarts and all: Finding the hidden psychology of Harry Potter Luke Sheehan, BA (2005), caught up with Mary Pyle , PhD (2022), MA (1978), BA (1960) to discuss her psychoanalytic exploration of the unconscious themes in the Harry Potter series for her PhD thesis I t is 1997. You are 11 years old. You pick up a little paperback book. Through it, you follow an English orphan into a secret world, into a society of wizards. To a secret school, where he learns magic, makes wizard friends, learns about his origins and destiny. You follow him for the next 10 years. His approach to maturity, his painful ‘400 blows’ seem to match your own, though his adventures are noisier, more colourful. But somehow, all of this is smarter than just an invitation to escape; it has the qualities of masterpieces written nominally for children, of getting deep into your psyche and taking root there. But how does it do that? When psychoanalyst Mary Pyle began to examine Harry Potter in a PhD for Trinity’s School of English in 2014, she used her thesis to explore the unconscious power of Rowling’s stories, deploying the theories she had put into practice for over half a century. Accepted in 2022, Harry Potter and the Unconscious Dimension made Pyle, now 86, one of Trinity’s oldest graduates. It bookended an epic relationship to the institution. Née Burrows, Mary first attended in the 1960s. She married Fergus Pyle, who would go on to become editor of the Irish Times , passing away in 1997 – the year of the first Potter book. Mary Pyle, whose family have been attending Trinity since the 18th century, co-founded the Irish Forum for Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy, and played an active role in the establishment of the MSc in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy in her alma mater, as well as teaching the practice of analysis there for decades. She was well-placed, therefore, to ask what ‘is so important at an unconscious level in Harry Potter that people respond to it?’ While that might sound like a burdensome task, and the thesis’ 90 thousand words treat of the full seven books of
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