I found an old but interesting post... Neville's Fruedian toad...

[vmonte]

No: HPFGUIDX 122941


vmonte:
I just found a very old but interesting post discussing among
others things Neville's toad as a fruedian metaphor for male
masculinity, and Snape's attack of Trevor as a form of castration.
I've quoted some of it below. You need to really read the whole post
though.

"In such a cultural context, power is not merely power. It is power
as expressed through pride and ambition, power as expressed through
competition, conflict, certamen. It is power as expressed through
struggle. It is power as expressed through striving and through
strife. That is what I believe that Neville fears, and that is what
I think that he sees personified in Snape.

It is a very masculine type of power, and viewed in this context,
Snape's targetting of the toad Trevor takes on some unavoidably
Freudian overtones. In spite of having proposed in my last message
that Trevor might serve as a textual symbol of Neville's magical
potency itself, I'd been hoping to avoid getting *too* Freudian with
this analysis, but...oh, well, it's just so hard to avoid with
Neville, isn't it? The poor boy really does seem to be quite the
mass of Freudian conflict. And besides, it's fun, so let's go for
it. After all, as Pippin and Tabouli have had a blast discussing,
frogs and toads have a long history of standing in as representations
of masculine sexuality, and the concept of wizards' animal companions
as repositories or symbols of their potency has some very deep roots
as well.

So when Snape threatens Trevor in Potions class, or forces Neville to
disembowel toads as his detention, I'm afraid that I *do* tend to
read that as a castration threat. In essence, I think that the
message that Neville himself must be taking away from it is: "Use it
or lose it, boy!"

Small wonder that Snape scares him so.

And while we're grovelling around down here in the dirt with the
psychoanalytic theory, how *about* those cauldrons, eh?

Gulplum wrote:

> The main way in which Neville's problems with Snape show up is his
> knack of destroying cauldrons. We're reminded of this several
> times. What's so important about that element, or am I just reading
> too much into it?

Mmmmmmm. Well. We could go off on quite the riff here, I suppose,
about what it might mean for Dreaded Dark Animus Snape to encourage
the fire of Neville's suppressed masculinity to erupt forth, melting
right through the protective womb-like enclosure of the cauldron,
couldn't we? If you favor both "Gran gave Neville a Memory Charm"
and "Snape is trying to crack Neville's Memory Charm," then such an
interpretation would certainly give you plenty of room to maneuver.

Or, if you prefer, we could contemplate instead the symbolic
connection between a cauldron with a melted bottom and the
flawed receptive vessel of a mind that cannot retain memory.
Here we touch on Jung: memory is the repository of culture,
the cauldron is the receptacle of the collective unconscious,
and the effect of Neville's poorly-controlled magic is to
render his own internalized cauldron inoperative, thus cutting
him off from both the benefits and the dangers of his own
cultural legacy.

Is "a mind like a bottomless cauldron" the wizarding equivalent
of "a mind like a leaky sieve," perhaps? Or, for that matter,
a mind like a leaky PENsieve?

Perhaps.

So if what Snape represents to Neville is power, then how does
that relate to the ongoing motif of memory?

Porphyria wrote:

> I think his cultivated ineptness is related to the memory charm,
> but perhaps only thematically. Perhaps his susceptibility to
> forgetting parallels his refusal to acknowledge his power."

Vivian
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HPforGrownups/message/38398