[HPforGrownups] Humanizing Myrtle and the nature of Ghost life (was Why i...

[alicit at aol.com]

No: HPFGUIDX 47555


> --- shane dunphy wrote:
> >Myrtle's living in the
> >toilet, spending time 
> >down the U-Bend in the pipe, and even allowing
> >herself to be flushed out 
> >into the lake (amid the detritus deposited from
> >above) is certainly a 
> >parrallel of this type of behaviour pattern.  Could
> >it be that her death, 
> >right in the midst of adolescence, has left her with
> >some unresolved issues?
> 
Shane also wrote some things about the Freudian Stages of sexual development, 
namely that Myrtle was stuck at the Anal stage of development.

Originally I was Just going to leave that well alone, because I was not going 
to get into what could have possibly caused an adolescent girl to still be 
stuck in the Anal stage... 

(I just realized that I should probably reference this for everybody: the 
three stages of development, according to Freud, are the oral (age 0-1.5), 
the anal-sadistic stage(1.5-3), and phallic (aged 4-5) stages, a latency 
stage (aged 5-puberty) and the genital stage (beyond puberty).  for more 
info,  the site I used was psychology.about.com/library/weekly/aa111500a.htm 

So, even though I was not, origionally, going to go into what could have 
trapped Myrtle at the Anal stage, I found myslef thinking of Steven King's 
book, _Carrie_.  *hears the groans of assembled list-persons* I know, I know, 
it's a little off the wall, but there could be some Carrie-esque issues that 
could have caused Myrtle's repression.   

I Quote from the article mentioned above:

> 
> Anal-Retentive Personality: If a child receives excessive pressure and 
> punishment from parents during toilet training, he will experience anxiety 
> over bowl movements and take pleasure in being able to withhold such 
> functions. Individuals who fail to progress pass this stage are obsessively 
> clean and 
> orderly, and intolerant of those who aren't. They may also be very careful, 
> stingy, withholding, obstinate, meticulous, conforming and 
> passive-aggressive
    
    
withholding? obstinate? passive-aggressive? I'd say that our Myrtle does have 
these traits.  She is very obstinate in her persual of Olive until she was 
forcibly removed, she does withhold information on a regular basis, only 
telling what she knows if she is first flattered into revealing it, which 
also plays into passive agressiveness (remember when she was talking with 
Harry in the prefect's bathroom in GoF?)

Anyway, back to the Carrie analogy:  This is a streach, but maybe Myrtle's 
magical abilities were frowned on by her parents.  They may have started 
showing while she was still in the anal stage of development, and was 
punished severely for it (like carrie) this may also account for her need to 
be accepted by her peers, if she wasn't by her family.  I know that  this 
list was fighting about it a while ago, but I do think that there is enough 
cannonical evidence to assume that Myrtle was Muggle-born...

-Scheherazade, talkative today with random ideas


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