This thesis argues that trauma operates in two manners in the Harry Potter series. The two chapters offer rival psychoanalytical readings of trauma, one Freudian and the other Lacanian. These two theoretical discourses provide the framework for reading the central traumatic event of Harry’s parents’ murder. Each chapter examines the representation of trauma and trauma’s effects on identity formation. Additionally, each chapter explores Rowling’s attempts to resolve Harry’s trauma.

Chapter one, the Freudian reading, examines the traumatic event as a singular one that can be mastered via active repetition. For Harry Potter, mastery of trauma is achieved through testimony. Testimony transforms the passive experience of witnessing into action by means of a performative speech act. Trauma is reconstructed as an event that can be represented, understood, and, consequently, worked through.

Conversely, the Lacanian reading argues that the traumatic event is an impossible encounter with the Real. Trauma has no inherent meaning but is retroactively ascribed one in compliance with the symbolic order. Moreover, trauma can never be accurately represented because the Symbolic cannot capture the Real. Chapter two explores Harry’s identity formation under the effects of trauma. Harry’s lack of familial influence provides him the opportunity to view social antagonisms from a new perspective. Harry is not limited to patriarchal views of masculinity as he repeats his mother’s sacrifice and accepts help in defeating Voldemort, the source of the wizarding world’s social antagonisms.

The thesis concludes that, though a Lacanian reading of Harry Potter’s trauma provides greater insight into his identity formation, Rowling fails to imagine a new social order for Harry’s wizarding world. Rowling becomes caught in the contemporary trope that Kirby Farrell identifies as the hallmark of “post-traumatic culture,” in which trauma is conceived as “both a clinical syndrome and a trope something like the renaissance figure of the world as a stage, a strategic fiction that a complex, stressful society is using to account for a world that seems threateningly out of control” (2). In an attempt to make sense of a world out of control, Rowling unnecessarily adds an epilogue that only functions to recuperate traditional meta-narratives, specifically the patriarchal family and Christianity.