Character Psychological Profiles - Umbridge

[Jim Ferer]

No: HPFGUIDX 127506


-Kemper: " I have a new question. Umbridge. She wears a lot of rings.
For me,  this is almost always a sign of a Borderline or a Histrionic.
But  she doesn't quite read/feel like one. She does seem to have a 
psychosis. Maybe bipolar?"

Julie: "Umbridge is an odd bird. As a professor of mine said, some
people are hard to diagnosis because "Mean Old Battle Axe" ain't in
the DSM! I do not think she is Bipolar because I do not see the
fluctuation of her mood. Even if she were a "mean manic," I see her
presentation as too consistent to be Bipolar. Could she be Dysthymic?
It is a chronic depressive condition, with hers being expressed as
irritable, unhappy, and generally nasty? I don't know."

Umbridge seems to be at the extreme end of a path Percy seems well
started on.  She's an apparatchik.  Having no moral compass of here
own, she's turned over her conscience and sense of right and wrong to
someone else, in this case Fudge and "the Ministry" as if it was a
higher power. She will not follow her own path, only someone else's. 
The official facts are her facts, the official truth her truth. 
Thinking is not required.

 The world is full of people like this, and always had been; Henry II
asked "Will no one rid me of this troublesome priest?"  Some knights
heard it, and Thomas á Becket died.  Umbridge would have approved. 
Heck, she tried it with Dementors.  The swords would have been kinder.
 Jodl, Keitel, and Eichmann "just followed orders."  JKR clearly
doesn't approve of people without their own consciences.

It's a kind of reflected sociopathy, an amorality come by second-hand.

Jim Ferer