Mischief Managed: Harry Potter's Marauder's Map

I recently re-watched all the Harry Potter films for the first time in years, and what struck me this time around was how rich in psychological symbolism those stories are. There’s a reason they are so widely captivating – the combination of Rowling’s elaborate and creative construction of fantasy, the presence of age-old character types and the hero’s journey storyline. But watching now with more knowledge of Jungian psychology and related ideas, so many things jumped out at me as symbolic of psychic processes. Objects, places, characters, situations – there is psychological wisdom woven into the stories and illustrated through these elements. This is the first of a series of posts in which I am going to reflect on possible psychological interpretations of these stories. 

One element that stood out to me in the third film (Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban) is the “Marauder’s Map.” For those who are unfamiliar, the Marauder’s Map is a map of Hogwarts (the school of witchcraft and wizardry situated in a castle that constitutes the main setting for much of the story). But it is no ordinary map – if you know how to access it, it will show you who is in what location in the castle in real time, in addition to otherwise secret rooms and passageways. What does it mean psychologically to have a map of a place in which we can see others’ activities and hidden structures?

I am inclined to treat the people who appear on the map not as people in the external world, but aspects of one’s own psyche, specifically complexes. Jung described complexes as clusters of psychological experience and energy constellated around a particular theme. Supposedly developed through life experiences to aid comprehension and navigation of the environment, they come with organised patterns of behaviour that are set in motion when the complex is activated.

When it comes to the castle, no symbol has a single meaning but, in this case, it might neatly represent the psyche. When thinking about complexes, castles seem like relevant locations. They are big and intricate in structure, offering many hiding places in which complexes may dwell, evading your search efforts only to jump out when you’re least expecting it. They may hold fascinating historical artifacts, structures that have fallen into disrepair and locked rooms with secrets – in other words relics of the past, neglected parts of the personality and aspects of experience that are banished from consciousness. And of course, castles have robust defences – often used to symbolise security, they were traditionally built with moats and thick walls to make invasion difficult, an external version of psychic defence mechanisms.

So, for me the Marauder’s Map in its entirety is like a symbol for one of the ultimate goals of psychodynamic approaches – revealing the inner workings of the psyche and bringing the conscious and unconscious into contact. One aspect of this is learning to recognise when complexes arise in real time and to track their activity. This can lead us to better understandings of our behaviour and the situations we find ourselves in, but also insight about archaic experiences that we thought were long gone yet still drive us beneath our awareness. In the story, the Marauder’s Map reveals that the character of Peter Pettigrew is still alive, contrary to the beliefs of his old colleagues. To me this reflects the fact that nothing in the psyche really goes extinct or vanishes altogether – it just retreats into the periphery, perhaps shrinking to a rat-like size, but with the potential to be reactivated under the right circumstances.

In that sense, the Marauder’s Map symbolises a method of tracking complexes’ movements. But the way in which one accesses the information hidden within the map is curious – swearing that you are solemnly up to no good. What does that mean?

Let’s backpedal a bit to look at the map’s origin. The quartet of self-proclaimed “Purveyors of Aids to Magical Mischief-Makers” – James Potter, Sirius Black, Remus Lupin and Peter Pettigrew – created the map using the “Homonculous” charm. The name of the charm is strikingly similar (probably deliberately) to the word “homunculus”, a term used to describe a miniature person in folklore and alchemy. In some sense that’s what one sees on the map – miniature people, and that’s one metaphorical way of conceptualising complexes. Given their autonomous nature, complexes do almost act as separate people, under the larger umbrella of the individual that houses them.

Furthermore, in neuroscience we have the cortical homunculus, which is a sort of map of the brain as depicted in a caricature of a person with its body parts distorted in size to represent the proportion of the cortex devoted to their function. Less directly linked to the map, but nonetheless I found that interesting, as an attempt to visually represent some of the brain’s activity.

Then we have the idea of “mischief-makers” which triggers images of the “trickster” archetype. I will do a deep dive into this concept in a later post, but briefly the trickster archetype describes a pattern of behaviour characterised by humour, creativity, cunning and of course mischief. This pattern is often reflected in stories by figures who use trickery, lateral thinking and playfulness to get to places they shouldn’t be able to get to and generate solutions inaccessible to others. They break rules and defy convention, sometimes with malicious aims but other times with the view to transforming a stale situation. Examples from TV shows are endless: “Lucifer”, Bart Simpson, Root (Person of Interest), Jake Parolta (Brooklyn 99), Leslie Knope (Parks and Recreation) ….

Indeed, the Marauder’s Map is given to Harry by the twin brothers (Fred and George) of his best friend Ron Weasley, two trickster-type figures. They steal the map from the office of Argus Filch, the grouchy caretaker of Hogwarts, believing Harry will make best use of it in his future ordeals. So, the map is created and later obtained by mischievous individuals to support heroic adventures, and to access its contents one needs to promise to be engaging in mischief. One interpretation of this is that access to insight into our own psyches and the journey of self-enquiry involved is not for those who are unwilling to bend the rules and be open to new ways of thinking - often ways of thinking that reveal previous ways as obsolete or outright ridiculous. It is the trickster who is willing to be shown up as a fool in order to enter new realms.

But whose rules are we breaking?

If we return briefly to the character of Argus Filch, his responsibilities are to manage the castle and police students’ behaviour so that order is maintained. From one angle, he is performing some functions that belong to the ego. The ego is the conscious sense of “I”, the aspect to us that affords us a sense of continuity over time, an identity, and attempts to mediate between the outside world and our inner worlds. The ego is therefore essential for operating in the external world and it requires a sense of order to do that, which it seeks to generate through meaning-making and organisation of experience into what psychology refers to as schemata.

But that necessarily means the ego is somewhat sceptical of ideas that violate that sense of order and structure. Argus Filch is intolerant of and sometimes actively adversarial towards the students, who could be considered symbolic of the process of learning and the quality of open-mindedness, not to mention the potential for youthful mischief and rebellion against authority (as exhibited by the Weasley twins). Why, when these seem like overly positive qualities? One answer could be that these qualities pose a potential threat to the conventional way of doing things. So perhaps in accessing the Marauder’s Map, we are bending the ego’s rules – being open to seemingly nonsensical, fantastical and irrational experiences, or simply to the idea that things exist outside our awareness. And it makes sense to have such rules – we need to be organised in our thinking and sense-making to an extent. The consequences of not having that organisation can be seen in states such as psychosis. But if we cling too rigidly to our current understanding of ourselves and the world, we risk becoming stuck in our ways.

On the other hand, it is possible to spend so much time and energy analysing the contents of one’s mind that nothing else gets done and things become overly complicated, so it is necessary to put a bookend on it from time to time, dipping in and out rather than leaving the map permanently open. We can see this in the ability to re-conceal the contents by stating “mischief managed”, although this function also implies a need or desire to hide the contents from the eyes of third parties. Perhaps this hints to the dangers of sharing too much personal information with individuals who have conflicting agendas.

I could go on– each of the observations made above could be analysed individually, but I’ll leave that for later times.