A psychobiographyof Hermione Granger

How Minister Granger came to be sitting across from me, a muggle, as a client

Client biography

Hermione Jean Granger is an English muggle-born witch and the current Minister for Magic. As a child, the nurturing and encouragement of her dentist mother and father enabled her to trust the people in her life, function autonomously with high degrees of success, and successfully transition her academic studies when she began studying at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardy.

Growing up, Minister Granger was highly focused on her studies and championing a number of causes for the improved treatment of magical creatures. Though it took some time to get her to share this, she did acknowledge that, academically, she was beyond her years at any given age. Her precocious young mind combined with a penchant for taking initiative and proving herself is why she was initially an outsider at school. And while this certainly improved following the beginning of her friendships with Harry Potter and Ronald Weasley, the latter later becoming her husband, she was known throughout the school by students and staff alike to be a know-it-all.

Minister Granger is, today, one of the busiest working witches in the whole of the wizarding world. What little leisure time she has, she spends at home with her family and with friends. She sets aside time each day to ensure she remains involved in the lives of her two children and, in her opinion, is managing to cope “very well” with the stress of her work. However, Minister Granger has expressed concern that she has grown too comfortable with her life. She began seeing me because she does not believe she is currently doing enough to make further significant impact on the world. She believes that she is “stagnating at the start of Erik Erikson’s seventh stage of development.” I have quoted Minister Granger here to note that she has done her own research on the matter, coming to me having self-diagnosed herself and seeking a specialist with whom she can uncover and develop a treatment plan.

Theoretical perspective

Erik Erikson’s psychosocial life stages will be used to examine Minister Granger. My decision here was simplified by my client having conducted her own research ahead of our early sessions and providing me with a framework with which we can collaborate.

I am particularly drawn to this theory because it looks at the development of our species from infancy to death, divides those stages into reasonable age groups, and points to fixation happening at stages of life that are more in line with how I believe many of us view the stages of life (from infancy and early childhood to adolescence and early adulthood all the way to adulthood and maturity (perhaps late adulthood)). It is a more balanced approach to viewing our development and evolution of personality, whereas other theories such as Sigmund Freud’s psychosexual stages suggest our personality is fully developed by the age of six.

Personality analysis

At age 41, Minister Granger is currently in Erikson’s seventh stage of generativity versus stagnation. During this adult stage, people are concerned with their ability to establish and guide the next generation (Slater, 2003, p. 57). In her role as a parent and provider, it is my belief that Minister Granger has demonstrated generativity through her continued encouragement and involvement in the lives of her children. It is because of her involvement in her children’s lives, and the privilege that has been afforded them through her role as Minister for Magic, that she so confidently believes that they have been well-prepared for the lives ahead of them.

It is for the youth outside of her immediate and extended family — and, by her own admission, the wider wizarding world (current and future generations included) — that she is presently concerned. Minister Granger believes that she has grown comfortable, and she believes this to be a bad thing. She presently questions whether or not she has done enough, given her position, to leave the world in a better place than when she became Minister for Magic. Further to the conflict Erikson speaks of in this seventh stage of development, Minister Granger confidently believes that she is no longer doing enough to safeguard the wizarding world from weak leaders, corruption, and the possible rising of a new dark witch or wizard. Despite the outstanding work she has done in raising her children, reforming the Ministry of Magic, championing newly-strengthened relations between foreign allies, and wholly transforming the wizarding world’s relationships with and treatment of magical creatures, Minister Granger is presently indulging herself in a mild self-absorption that has brought her to this period of stagnation and my office.

I do not believe that this is the first time that Minister Granger has found herself dealing with these attitudes. More importantly, however, I believe that she is currently wading through the intersection of multiple unresolved conflicts from earlier developmental stages — Erikson’s school-age industry versus inferiority and adolescence identity versus role confusion stages.

At the age of 11, during the industry versus inferiority stage, all of Minister Granger’s academic studies had to shift from the typical studies of muggles to begin her studies as a witch. Her more than able mind saw her quickly because the best student in her year at Hogwarts, despite being muggle-born. It seems that it was in part because she is muggle-born, coupled with her natural thirst for knowledge, that she worked so tirelessly to prevent failure.

During this time, Minister Granger found it hard to resist the urge to share her knowledge at every given opportunity. While quite plainly proving her superiority over her peers, she managed to further ostracized herself. She has presently expressed concern for being out of touch with the lived reality of most in her world, particularly given her natural tendency for planning for the future, and I believe this is a conflict that remains unresolved from her school-age years.

It has also become clear to me that the ongoing quest to defeat Lord Voldemort and the Battle of Hogwarts have created further unresolved conflict for Minister Granger during the identity versus role confusion stage. At the age of 16, Professor Albus Dumbledore, an indirect advisor through her best friend Harry Potter, died. She made the decision along with Harry and Ron to miss her final year at school, a place where she felt safest both physically and mentally, to pick up where Dumbledore left off. Alongside her two best friends, she was repeatedly tasked with overcoming more than her peers, but no longer was she a student. Moreover, her pursuit to save the world meant that she was being hunted. Minister Granger has admitted that during this period of her life she questioned herself and her belief in herself more than any other time in her life, present circumstances notwithstanding. She remained strong for her friend Harry but acknowledges that she felt a sense of abandonment by Dumbledore. Throwing herself into books, what she always did as a student when she did not have the answers, did not immediately provide solutions to the biggest challenges facing her and her friends.

As a result of this turbulent time, I do believe Minister Granger got a headstart on Erikson’s sixth psychosocial stage, intimacy versus isolation, which typically happens during young adulthood. Without question, the events that unfolded following the death of Dumbledore brought Minister Granger, in her own words, “closer to [her] best friends than [she] thought possible” and cemented her romantic relationship with Ron. This level of intimacy, in connection with her identity and present generativity, demonstrates the generative virtue (ego strength) of care (Slater, 2003, p. 63).

I believe that Minister Granger knows her identity, but has trauma to work through. She has most certainly achieved intimacy, knowing full well who she loves to be with (Slater, 2003, p. 63). And the love and care she has provided both her family and the wizarding world suggest to me that this period of stagnation in no serious way objectively detracts from her generativity. Our collaborative focus must now be on exploring why it is important she accepts and examines this necessary period of pause in her career and life to continue moving forward.

Course of treatment

In my opinion, Minister Granger has temporarily lost her way. As a result of trodding into this rarely ventured territory and the realities (responsibilities) of her life, she is employing a number of cognitive distortions which continue to perpetuate this present stagnation. The cognitive distortions we’ve identified so far include arbitrary inference, selective abstraction, and absolutistic dichotomous thinking.

To begin, I want to explore cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) with Minister Granger. I want to focus on enabling her to demonstrate to herself the power of her highly logical and rational mind, the same mind that has gotten her this far in life so quickly and successfully. We shall start with working to overcome arbitrary inference, as I believe it fuels the other cognitive distortions at play in her mind. The primary symptoms I will evaluate include the language used to describe herself and her actions when recounting life events (how self-deprecating she is) and how much concrete, rational evidence is used to support her interpretations of events. As we encounter arbitrary inference in the recounting of an event, I will ask Minister Granger to recount events in which she is not central but merely a collaborator or observer. My belief is that she will be successful in refraining from employing arbitrary inference when sharing her version of someone else’s. My goal is to show her that if she can be rational as an observer then she can be rational as the main character in her own story.

Ultimately, my goal is to enable Minister Granger to return to the highly logical individual she has always been. As the language used in her storytelling becomes more rational, so too shall her mind.

My chief concerns with this course of treatment are that I am working with a highly intelligent and perceptive client and that she may too soon grow disinterested in the constant work of recounting what must be rather mundane daily life events. First, Minister Granger will very quickly draw her own conclusions about the plan I have developed and most likely probe for weakness. I recognize this plan is a starting point, and one that will necessarily evolve as my client’s treatment and thinking also evolve. Second, the work of examining daily life is tedious for most, and Minister Granger’s days are no longer what they were during her years at Hogwarts. I will have to gain and maintain her trust in the methods I’ve laid out if we are to be successful.

Theory critique

One of the plainest critiques I can offer given my client’s experiences and what she has brought to my office is that Erikson’s psychosocial life stages do not occur exclusively during the ages he has prescribed. A present-day conflict can very much be the result of events that happened many years or decades ago. Further, I think many of these stages can occur at many different periods of life (e.g., school age, adolescence, young adulthood, etc). For example, initiative versus guilt or intimacy versus isolation. Why can’t these stages occur at earlier or later periods of life, and why can’t they occur more than once?

I do not believe Erikson’s developmental theory can be broadly applied to all populations, because it does not appear as if he learned enough about the world’s different populations for his theory to be applicable. Western and Eastern cultures of industrialized nations, certainly. Apply this lens. Beyond that, utilize Erikson’s theory as a blunt tool for which you intend to sharpen when learning about the lives and cultures of other populations.

Finally, there are seemingly limitless biological and societal circumstances — disorders, disabilities, poverty, and status, for example — that can have a significant impact on when these stages occur in an individual’s life, the amount of control one can exert over their own life choices, and the community of people that enter and influence one’s life. I do not believe Erikson accounted for this enough.

References

Slater, C. L. (2003). Generativity versus stagnation: An elaboration of Erikson’s adult stage of human development. Journal of Adult Development, 10(1), 53–65. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1020790820868

Originally published at https://www.mlboykin.com.