The Over Fulfilled Baby (psychoanalysis and Dudley Dursley)

Dudley Dursley is a relatively important minor character in the fantasy series Harry Potter written by British author J.K. Rowling.

He’s always perplexed me because I’m not sure if I should feel bad for him or not.

At first glance, it seems absurd to apologize for his reprehensible behavior. In a particularly memorable passage from the first novel in the series, he recalls perfectly the amount of presents he’s received during his birthday the previous year and complains about getting one fewer.

It’s hard to find a less sympathetic character in the entire series.

And that’s weird, right? Many of the villains are completely dastardly or pure evil yet, personally, I find myself reflectively feeling disgust when encountering Dudley especially in the first three novels.

Even Rubeus Hagrid a wonderful character usually filled with kindness to even the most dangerous creatures snaps at the young Dudley shaming him about his weight and calling him a pig.

I think one reason he takes so much heat is because his relationship to his mother is a really hyperbolic example of something that’s probably more common during our current moment than ever before.

It’s never be easier to envelop the people you love in a cocoon of material safety where they need never step out of their comfort zone or engage with the truth.

So, maybe we should let Dudley off the hook and blame his parents? A recent experience has made me rethink that entirely.

I’ve been enchanted over the last year by the philosopy of self directed learning and the life style of unschooling.

In short, these ideas help shift the paradigm of childhood development towards giving the child stewardship over their growth and autonomy over their life.

I’ve found both the theoretical underpinnings and concrete results to be incredibly persuasive.

However, in practice I’m a bit disappointed to say that I found them more challenging to implement than I would have hoped.

While I’m not a parent, I have a god daughter who’s recently begun to ride a bike on her own without training wheels.

I’ve been surprised at how much this terrifies me.

She’s not much interested in the safe confines of the playground and instead prefers the road in front of her house that has a wide banking turn at the bottom of a fairly steep 150 yard descent.

Basically, it’s an incredibly fun hill to ride your bike on.

But I can’t stay focused on how much fun she has because of a sense of impending doom with visions of tragedy involving drunk or speeding drivers flying around the curve in the oncoming direction.

I think this tension between the natural and understandable urge to keep people we care about safe while also allowing them to leave their comfort zone, make mistakes, get in trouble, and ultimately flourish is something that’s incredibly important to master and understand.

While family situations aren’t typically as grotesque as what Dudley grew up with I think it’s an interesting exercise to look back at his childhood and do a theoretical analysis of his life looking for potential areas of growth.

To do that we’ll first look at the work of Sigmund Freud on how the personality develops in relation to developmental milestones in the body.

For Dudley, I specifically would look at the oral stage especially to work through this interesting fascination with food.

As Dudley grew in his first year his mouth was the focal point of critical importance that acted as a source of pleasure and potential frustration.

For the newborn, most physical pleasure involves sucking and almost everything important at this stage passes through the mouth in some sense.

A key lesson to learn at this stage in life is proper balance between dependency and autonomy.

For Dudley, it’s easy to imagine a first year where every cry or sob was immediately numbed with sweets, soda, and obsessive nurturing.

This has led to problems in life for Dudley especially as it becomes more apparent that these coping strategies are ultimately ineffective for most of life’s challenges.

As they become more difficult a pattern emerges where Dudley deals with things that go wrong by regressing to a stage of whining and crying. Back to a time when that behavior was enough to make him feel secure and whole.

So, why does Dudley feel compelled to cope with strategies learned from infancy? For Freud, we can analyze behavior through two competing forces, tension and pleasure.

He developed a concept called libido. It’s an energy or a compelling force that helps drive human behavior.

In Dudley’s case his libido or what’s driving him is stuck at an infantile stage.

In psychoanalysis this “stuckness” phenomenon is known as a fixation. These are obsessive feelings, interests, or habits that are meant to regress Dudley back to a more comfortable time.

He particularly enjoys eating, beating up on Harry, and having fits in front of his parents. All of these habits reenforce the idea that he’s safe in role that he’s familiar with.

However, these fixations become more and more ineffectual as Dudley gets older and to compensate he continues to eat more, becomes more sadistic, and is acts even more ridiculously in front of his parents.

What’s interesting is that Dudley’s character really starts to show some growth potential after his encounter with the dementors.

These are certainly horrifying oral monsters and his encounter with them acted as a late initiation into the mysteries of adulthood.

In later essay’s we’ll develop more important concepts that will help you build a personal practice around working with Freud’s stages seriously, but for now I’ll leave you with a link to learn more about positive disintegration.