Manifestations of Jung’s Shadow Archetype in Potter’s Dreams
Do you have a permanent relationship with an enemy you can’t avoid him? Do you have a feeling that you should ring him and can’t stop thinking about him? Are there psychological reasons for this strange connection? This magical correlation is created by one person: J. K. Rowling, the first children writer featured in a Time cover story on Sep. 20, 1999. An illustration of Harry Potter on the cover of Time magazine carries Rowling aloft to the platform of famous authors. Rowling’s seven series have been read nowadays as a history of magic, a journey to where myth and magic began. Jo, as she has been called since she was little, always wanted to be a writer. Every day she filed papers and made copies. She scribbled the names of imaginary people and places on the backs of papers.
The first spark of the wizarding world took place in a train going from Manchester to London where Jo stared out the window, thinking of nothing. Suddenly! a picture of a boy popped into her head. He had round glasses and a scar shaped like a lightning bolt. He was a wizard, but he didn’t know it. He lived with a family who was not his real family. They kept his magic a secret. They hoped to squash it out of him. But the boy’s magic was too strong. As the train sped through the English countryside, more people crowded into Jo’s head. They were people the boy knew. There was a ghost named Nearly Headless Nick, a headmaster of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, a best friend with red hair, and a clever girl named Hermione. By the time Jo reached London, she had a whole new world in her head. One day, she hoped, she could write a book about it. On the first page, she wrote the name of the boy with the lightning bolt scar. His name was Harry Potter. He is an orphan living with his only remaining family, the Dursleys, who are neglectful and abusive. As a student in Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, this little boy finds himself confronted with You-Know-Who, He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named, or the Dark Lord.
The first book in the Harry Potter series, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (1997; also published as Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone) was an immediate success, appealing to both children and adults. Succeeding volumes — Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (1998), Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (1999), Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2000), Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (2003), and Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (2005) — also were bestsellers, available in more than 200 countries and some 60 languages. The seventh and final novel in the series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, was released in 2007. Rowling’s series of Harry Potter push boundaries, and they lack rules and infinite possibilities. While she announced the ending of Harry Potter’s series in 2007, she hinted, on the Oprah Winfrey Show in 1st October 2010, that she “could definitely write an eighth, ninth, tenth … easily. ”
All characters are still in her head as if they are real and their school is a real place. Thus, her stories are experimental, remarkable and very wide. Rowling’s works feel completely out of time; it could have been written yesterday, and yet it is more than 100 years old. They are a mix of wild emotions and detachment, full of exclamation points and warnings. Her product simply is a part of a long-standing, well-established piece of literature that pushes boundaries of genre and form.
This paper focuses on three novels of Harry’s series: Harry Potter and Philosopher’s Stone (1997), Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2000), and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (2007). All these novels display Harry Potter as the main protagonist in the Harry Potter universe. He becomes famous in the wizarding world after his initial encounter with Voldemort who left him an orphan with a lightning-shaped scar on his forehead. On the other hand, Lord Voldemort is the evil dark wizard that is the arch-nemesis to Harry Potter. He is so feared that most wizards refuse to say his name. Tom Marvolo Riddle, known as Voldemort, or He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named, is the primary villain in the Harry Potter series.
After targeting and killing Lily and James Potter, Voldemort attempted to kill Harry, only to miscalculate the protection of his parents' love. Destroyed and diminished when his spell reflected off the infant's Love Shield, Voldemort retreated and began looking for a way to return to power. The Harry Potter books cover Voldemort’s return to power and ultimate defeat at the hands of a teenaged Harry Potter. In Jungian perspective, however, all three novels open with struggling between these two persons, Harry and Voldemort, but finally they end with one conclusion:
Lord Voldemort is Harry’s unknown dark side, lower self, and unconscious darkness. Those traits come together to form what Carl Jung called the “Shadow” as an inferior or even worthless belongs to the human being. This conception of shadow contains an idea; he who follows behind. In the book, Modern Man in Search of a Soul, Jung said: “I must have a dark side if I am to be whole, and in as much as I become conscious of my shadow I also remember that I am a human being like any other. ” Each person should keep his shadow to restore “his neurosis or the splitting off of the complex”. Thus, Voldemort is Harry’s shadow which Harry must own. It is Voldemort who makes Harry the hero of the wizarding world.
Rowling’s two characters, Potter and Voldemort, have many things in common to build up the shadow relationships between them: family, snake’s language, wand and half-blood. They all start from their childhoods, they can be seen as the two different life paths of one person, and the two life paths reflect each other. As much as “the shadow belongs to the light as the evil belongs to the good, and vice versa”, the two are connected tightly, being the reflections of each other. Rowling makes Voldemort the dark side shadow of Harry, and Harry is the bright side shadow of Voldemort. After all, Harry cannot be the hero or be the truly good character without the Dark Lord.
The focus is on the shadow, using a selection of Harry Potter’s dreams as vehicles to support, describe and reinterpret concepts from the literature. Throughout the series, extraordinary dreams are experienced by Harry Potter. These dreams give Harry vital idea about Voldemort’s plans cause Harry simply uses his shadow as “the figure nearest his consciousness and the least explosive one, it is also the first component of personality to come up in an analysis of the unconscious”.
The shadow appears in Harry’s dream as a bad or fearsome figure who threatens or betrays him. It is dark, wild, troubling, and perhaps disturbingly fascinating. Encounters with it reveal some of his deeper thoughts and fears. With the building up of the connection between Harry and Voldemort, the objective of this paper is to understand how the shadow archetype in Harry Potter’s dreams formed his individuation as a hero. Because “this shadow frequently appears in the phenomenology of dreams as a well-defined figure, … he (Dark Lord as a shadow) were hiding meaningful contents under an unprepossessing exterior”. In other words, the shadow in a dream has been represented as a human being who carries useful content and valuable guidance. Things, moreover, which revealed in dreams are not singing that display one specific idea, but rather fluid images.
So, dreams may reveal truths, illusions, fantasies, memories, plans, irrational experiences or even prophetic. The dream’s basic function is to confront Harry with his shadow to fulfill his destiny, to go toward the ultimate good. In the book, The Undiscovered Self, Jung asserts that self-knowledge is recognized by “connecting individuals with their dreams and symbols that spontaneously emerged from within”. Harry uses the dreams and their symbols as a torch to light his way, to solve mysteries, to trace his origin, and to find his other half. They also can shape his vision completely because “experience shows us that the sense of the 'I'—the ego-consciousness—” Modern Man in Search of a Soul. The images in Harry’s dreams are based on his own individual experiences. If he takes time to learn about these symbols and images and identify them in his own dreams, he has the possibility of increasing his awareness of his inner self, to realize at the end that Lord Voldemort is his dark shadow.
