Excellent essays.

[changeling]

As recommended to me by earlymorningair.

[Neville] is, if you will, Harry's shadow--the person Harry is always afraid he really is, that Dudley and his parents always told Harry he was: clumsy, awkward, stupid [but] Neville is actually every inch the hero. [...] Ginny starts out, similarly, as the Ron that Ron would hate to be--in the second book she seems lost, emotional, clingy and dependent. [...] But Ginny has continued to grow--no longer simply a girl in reaction to her own emotion, but someone with every bit as much courage as any of her brothers, a sense of humor to match the twins, and the spirit to challenge Harry directly--something even Ron doesn't do.
[...]
Freud and Jung would say that the thing you're afraid of is the thing you buried, the thing you secretly want to do. But now we have Loony Lovegood, who is Hermione's physical photo-negative (blonde fluffy hair instead of brown), who is, like Hermione, brainy, if in an entirely different way, and who embodies all of the things Hermione most lacks: intuition and faith. Not big-F Faith, [...] But little-f faith in the possibility of the world operating on laws that transcend the limits of mere physics, chemistry and biology.
"The Expansion of the Core Trio", antosha_c in hp_essays.


[M]ore importantly, "bad faith" (or mauvaise foi in modern French) has a very specific meaning in the existentialist philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre. Bad faith is a form of self-deception. To live in bad faith is to live as if you have no choice in the way you behave; it is to adopt a role and live your life according to that role regardless of your own feelings or desires. It is, most crucially, an abandonment of responsibility. Instead of acknowledging your freedom and your ability to act spontaneously of your own will, you regard yourself as a mere thing, a tool of fate; you negate your freedom and hence your humanity. Every time a person says "I have no choice," that person is living in bad faith.
[...]
[Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince] is not the beginning of Draco's bad faith, however, but the inevitable result of a life lived with nothing but bad faith.

The great Elkins once opined on HP4GU that Draco (in the first four books) frequently shows signs of mental instability. As she remarks in that excellent essay, "[this instability] often seems to be at its most pronounced when he is also on his very worst (and most "Junior Death Eater-ish") behavior." To me it seems that these signs of stress -- glittering eyes, flushed cheeks, stammering, his expression quivering -- are not indicative of underlying mental instability, but rather of Draco's consciousness of a rift between what he feels he ought to be thinking and feeling and what he really is thinking and feeling -- a rift, that is, between his authentic self and the role he has decided to play.
"Dragon of Bad Faith: Draco Malfoy and Existentialism", puritybrown in hp_essays.