
Harry Potter, Psychoanalysis, and the Unconscious studies the Harry Potter series through the lens of psychoanalysis focusing on the importance of space and play between the Potterverse and its readers. Twenty-five years since the first Harry Potter novel was published the popularity of the series shows little sign of decreasing: theme parks develop around the world, as have interactive websites and a plethora of academic papers and books have published around the world. Successive generations of children and their parents continue to read and enjoy these novels, their lively storytelling, complicated plots and attractive fictional characters with whom readers identify and care for. From a psychoanalytical standpoint, it seems as though some aspect of this popularity must lie in the unconscious of the reader-- which is what this book aims to explore.
Mary Pyle is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist who graduated with her PhD from the Trinity School of English.
"This is an exciting and important contribution to our knowledge about the Harry Potter series and to the wider critical conversation about children's literature. As a project that drew equally on the author's professional expertise in psychoanalysis and her deep passion for children's literature this is an interdisciplinary work and there is so much in it for both scholars of psychoanalysis and scholars of children's literature to learn from and benefit from. It opens up whole new ways for these disciplines to speak to one another.
It demonstrates that there are complex unconscious reasons to read and re-read certain books, and tackles many of the difficult themes in the series, notably the central role of death, and shows that combining psychoanalysis with children's literature offers us rich and innovative ways to understand and engage with these texts."
- Dr Jane Suzanne Carroll, Associate Professor in Children's Literature, Trinity College Dublin.