As if a wizarding child would be affected by silly things that muggles deem as abuse! What is this, the real world? Muggles, bah!

I spent a good few minutes chuckling over this thread. I really find it strange that we chose to remove characters in fantasy stories from their surrounding context and try to interpret them in-terms of the 'real world'. As has already been pointed out - Harry is a wizard in a fairy tale. The very notion of physical/emotional abuse in this setting, and application of psycho-analysis to it, seems very funny to me.

 

Why? Because a college-educated woman who herself may have just suffered through an abusive marriage and suffered depression leading to thoughts of possible suicide couldn't have conceived of a character suffering abuse and having any ill-effects from it?

tl;dr The author's not dead despite what Barthes and others think.

 

Of course not. I'm not much of a writer, but it seems entirely reasonable to me that a person's personal experiences would influence their creative work - in this case the characters in a story.

But we are trying to apply our moral/social standards to a fictional wizard who lives in a fantasy world. One in which there is already an in-canon example of the effects of systematic abuse: Neville.

Let us look at some of the things that happened with Neville in the first 8 years of his life:

1. Family/relations constantly trying to scare/startle/frighten him into performing accidental magic,
2. Dropped off Blackpool pier - nearly drowned (doubt he was in real danger of dying, but he was unlikely to have known that)
3. His first instance of accidental magic, where he was being suspended by his ankle from the window of what I presume is an upper storey room. The intention was likely again to try and scare accidental magic out of him, but he ended up being dropped on accident.
   
4. His overbearing grandmother constantly comparing him to his father who was an auror and accomplished wizard who stood against Voldemort and got tortured into insanity for it.
5. Fear of being a squib - which is so terrible in their world, they seem to think it better for the child to die than live as one.

Compared to this, it seems Harry's life doesn't seem so horrible. Much of the abuse Harry suffered seems to have been passive. Neville was subjected to active abuse and it took such a degree of it (matter of life or death - at least to a child who wouldn't know better) to create the insecure, clumsy, uncertain boy who questioned his own self worth.

Now consider that even in spite of all this, Neville grew out of, or overcame, the effects in time. It seems to me that the author intended for magical children to have not just a natural defense against physical danger but also more resilience to emotional/psychological damage. I consider Arianna to also be an example here, because for her it was not a case of the magic not reacting so much as it reacting in a bad way.

In this context there a couple of things that seemed interesting to me in the comparison between Harry's and Neville's respective situations.

First, Harry's accidental magic seems to have manifested a lot earlier that Neville's. Perhaps this meant that Harry's magical nature was better able to defend him at an earlier time than for Neville.

Second, Neville's abuse happened at the hands of people who were in a position of trust. Perhaps that made Neville's magical nature less effective as a defense than in Harry's case. Also, the Dursleys were non-magical people.

To complete my post - I think what the Dursleys did absolutely was abuse. More passive that active perhaps, but definitely abuse. I just don't think that that we can use our methods of analysis to decide that Harry's reaction to it all was unreasonable.

 

You're conflating several issues and making assumptions on others. First, onset of magic might or might not have anything to do with abuse. In fact, one could argue that early onset of magic comes because of abuse. If we throw neglect in there, then we have evidence in Riddle as well (orphanages are the epitome of neglect—not purposeful, but simply too many kids for the number of adults without any true affection). Neville simply may have been a late bloomer. It happens.

Moreover, you're taking a finite amount of events and trying to argue them as greater than daily neglect (criminal, to be honest), and to a lesser extent abuse. You're also discounting imprisonment both in the cupboard and locked in his room with bars on his window. Of course, then you have the constant berating not only of Harry, but of his parents.

Finally, it seems from the earlier post you're confusing a person's ability to adapt and be well-adjusted despite abuse with the reality of whether one was abused (and I'd argue Harry actually wasn't well adjusted but suffered several effects that crippled him in different ways including emotionally).

In short...
Neville = inferiority complex from overbearing grandma and being a late bloomer
Harry = starved, imprisoned in his own house, physically beat on by cousin who took boxing in school, endured verbal and emotion abuse at the hands of his caregivers consistently.

As for our methods . . . why not? It's the only thing we have to understand it, and it's in the background of the author who was writing about it as well. As for "reasonable" I don't know what you mean. Did it break narrative logic? Yes. The story told in the beginning of the series about abuse broke the internal logic when he went through absolutely no character growth in those specific areas and yet turned out perfectly adjusted. It's almost as bad as reading a rape scene and then the story goes on without any lingering effects on the character. It breaks the logic of the story.