This is a psychology essay. You don't have to know much, if anything, about psychology to read it, but I thought I'd let you know. This is just my take on a very interesting and complex character, and also my response to all the people who complain that JKR made Tom Riddle "basically born evil" with the release of the sixth book. Because that's just not true, and I think the way she wrote him was fairly brilliant. Here's why.

To start out bluntly - because that's what I am, blunt; you've been warned - I've been thinking and I realized that no matter what psychological lifespan theory you go by, Tom Riddle was pretty fucked up before he even hit eleven.

First, there's Erikson's eight stages of social development, in which a baby's first year of their life decides their basic sense of trust in the world around them for the rest of their lives. If their caretaker is not able to meet their needs during this first year - such as in a "grim" orphanage during World War I, where pretty much everything would have been growing scarcer all the time and you'd have been just another number - they grow up with a sense of mistrust of the world around them, and a feeling that people will be unable to stay faithful to them, care about them, and meet their needs. Then there's the stage following that, in which a toddler learns they have a sense of personal control over themselves and their own independence; I see some overcompensation from Tom here (in one of the memories in the sixth book, he says outright that he wanders around London all the time on his own, and he certainly likes to do everything for and keep to himself), because this was something he could actually have control over in his life, which probably would have been welcome in the kind of environment he grew up in - one he hated so much and yet could not literally escape. So he would have grown highly independent, only able to trust himself, and wandered farther and farther out beyond his confines to try to avoid "home." We see Harry doing the exact same thing at the beginning of both the first and fifth books.

The ruining of stage one and the overcompensation of stage two would in turn have pretty much ruined his chances of successfully completing stage six, where as a young adult we are supposed to be able to learn true intimacy, meaningful relationships, and how to share ourselves with another without fear of a rejection or a let-down on the part of the other person.

Then there was Bowlby, Harlow, and Ainsworth, who all built separately on a similar child psychology theory. Bowlby said that the first year, and our emotional attachments with our parents or guardians during that year, decide how we form emotional attachments for the rest of our lives. When you form close, healthy attachments, you will be more able to create a healthy relationship and healthy attachments with others later on in your life; when you form unhealthy attachments, you may have difficulty with relationships with others later on in your life. (Ainsworth built on this and said different unhealthy early attachments manifested themselves in different ways, but I'll get to that in a minute.) Bowlby had a particular theory about orphans; he conducted a number of studies of them in orphanages and concluded that orphans don't have the chance to form an emotional attachment to one person at all. He also said that according to his study, statistically, orphans were more likely to show troubled behavior than any other type of child, including one in a foster home.

Ainsworth classified different types of unhealthy attachments, and one fits Tom eerily well - the aloof, distant child. He conducted studies of children whose mothers put them in daycare centers for the day, and then watched how the toddlers reacted to their Moms leaving and how they reacted to their Moms coming back at the end of the day, but in some ways the principle still holds. One type of unhealthy, or "insecure", attachment occurred with an aloof, distant guardian. One type of child, he said, tended to become aloof and distant in response, unable to form any connection with their parents at all and not caring - at least, not outwardly - that their Mom was leaving them in the daycare center or that their Mom had come back to pick them up. (Remember Mrs. Cole saying that Tom had always been "funny", even as a boy? Very quiet and closed-off?) Ainsworth theorized that this predicted the child's ability to form attachments for the rest of their lives. Marlow added to this, doing a study so unethical that it's made the world's "top ten unethical psychology experiments" list, but one that admittedly did yield interesting results. He did a study on the behavior of baby rhesus monkeys who were torn from their mothers and not allowed to form an attachment to such a figure - instead, they were left by themselves. As adults, they understood connections to others so little that the only way to get them to breed was by forcing them, and then if they had any babies they either killed them or deprived them of love completely.

Wow, huh? Light-hearted stuff.

So, the question would be, if all the children at Riddle's orphanage were subjected to the same relative circumstances, why didn't they all turn out like him? They may not have had magic, but why did Mrs. Cole single out Tom as so odd and significant?

That might be part of our answer right there. Added to all of this - the lack of ability to connect with or trust others, the isolated independence in reaction to a lack of control over the grim circumstances he is trapped in, the "troubled orphanage children" statistic, and all the other theories - is Tom himself. I don't just mean whatever factors of his personality led to a predilection for who he became, though I have considered that. No one is born "evil", but I have sorted Tom into a psychological temperament type (based on the theories of Jung, Myers and Briggs, and Keirsey), which I do for all my fictional characters, and I believe that he is a type more prone to skepticism, independence, pessimism, and isolation, anyway. However, that is not the main point I want to make.

There are certain character traits of Tom Riddle that are consistent - he's dramatic, he wants to be unique to the point where he was annoyed with his name because a lot of other people had it, even his wand wood (yew) usually only goes for unusual wizards or witches, and there are other little facts about him in the series that have just always caught at me slightly. Things like the fact that he kept a diary as a teenager, or the fact that in the Horcrux memory in the sixth book, Slughorn's box of candies was wrapped with a little bow on top. I'm not sure why, but the thought of a teenage boy wrapping a present and putting a little bow on it for added effect when most teenage boys I know would either have sloppily wrapped it or just given the box straight-out managed to catch my eye. He was also extremely intelligent - Dumbledore outright called him a "genius" in book two - and very quiet, closed-off, and in-control of himself. He mentioned in his internal monologue during the murder of Harry's parents in book seven that he'd always hated the little ones "whining" in the orphanage - complaining about things that, presumably, nothing could be done about - and I can completely see a young Tom Riddle being the type of silent, observant, slightly discomfiting child who always seemed to know more about your role as the adult than you did.

Then, presumably fairly early on in life for how powerful he became, he would have discovered magic. And even considering we're talking about Tom Riddle, I doubt he would always have been able to control it or when it showed in front of others.

My point is, he can't always have been the one on top. And he was different, which people as a whole tend not to appreciate very much, especially in collectivistic environments. And while Mrs. Cole and the orphanage maids might have been able to ignore or hide the fact that he made them uncomfortable, children are much more observant than we give them credit for; Tom, of all people, would have been able to see it. At times, I even wonder if they tried to hide it as well as I give them credit for. Mrs. Cole admitted to always having thought Tom was odd - she mentioned how strange he was even as a baby, meaning there has never been a time when she has not thought he was odd, despite the fact that he can't always have been a bully - and I found Tom's defensiveness over Dumbledore's claim to be a "teacher" to be rather alarming. An eleven-year-old kid thought the person who ran his orphanage had called someone to have him carted off to an asylum. Even for a mistrustful child, or one who had something to hide, that is a very extreme reaction.

But what about the older children? It's commonly accepted that bullies aren't born - they're made. Usually, by people bullying them. I say that this could apply to Tom as much as it would to any other bully. He revealed in his internal monologue during his murder of Harry's parents his belief that weapons cannot be put down, "even for seconds." It's not just that he doesn't trust the world; he considers it a war zone. It's either attack or be attacked. (Remember his main philosophy: there's the powerful and the weak.) That kind of thinking is made. I doubt even the people who ran Woole's Orphanage would have abused or attacked children outright, so who attacked Tom? Who ingrained that onto his already-mistrustful mindset?

I say it's the children, the older children when he was a young child there. Remember, in that same Godric's Hollow monologue, he revealed that one of his main reasons for his contempt of the Muggle world is that he believes they "do not understand" his world - in simplest terms, they do not understand him. As a victim of bullying, this has a very good chance of being what he told himself, along with a healthy dose of growing anger and vindictiveness, which first prompted the thought, I'm just better than they are, that's all, I am different from them. Them vs Me, in other words, and also a way to reassure himself. I see him as needing reassurance, because based on the "asylum" comments, Tom seemed to have a very deep-seated uneasiness of whether or not he really was just insane - you don't become so reactionary and defensive about something if you do not, on some level, wonder whether or not it's true. (On an interesting side note, there's also the theory that if you call a child something enough, that is what they will become...)

We see this in the scene where Dumbledore reveals to Tom he is a wizard. Tom whispers to himself, almost "revently" it seems to Harry, that he always knew he was different - 'special.' But by repeating that line to himself out loud, I see him as confirming that for himself, over the under-riding belief: "I'm not insane, I'm just special. I was right." Then, on a very subconscious level, the confirmation: "I was right that I am better than everybody else." Tom already believed we are all islands unto ourselves, that the only good people in the world are the powerful, and now added to that is the subconscious idea that he is better than everybody else. Not a very healthy addition to add to the mix.

Not to mention, by that point, a lot of the damage on in the "insane" spectrum had already been done.

Back to little Tom, picked on by the children in the orphanage, for being strange, for being different. The idea's not so crazy; children do that to each other all the time. There's even a child psychology theory that all children go through a phase where they define who they are by the roles they see in the world around them, and therefore define anyone who does not fit neat little roles in the world as being "bad" and deserving "punishment" like they do when they do something naughty - which, mixed with feelings of discomfiture that different people often tend to inspire anyway, can create childhood bullies toward 'strange' children. On further evidence, Dudley & Co do the exact same thing to Harry during his own childhood.

Riddle reacts differently than Harry does. In Harry's "I'm a wizard realization", he was more inclined to trust from those influences in his early life, and so on some subconscious level he accepted that they were right in that he wasn't all that great - he just had enough stubborn spirit to know he wasn't a terrible person who should be a downtrodden little mouse; he never went so far as to think he "deserved" it. But Harry doesn't believe he is a wizard at first because he reacted to bullying by retreating inward; 'I'm not good enough to be a wizard' he tells Hagrid, in so many words. Tom immediately jumps all the way on the other side to 'I'm a special wizard' because he reacted to bullying quite the opposite; he covered all his insecurities with anger and "I'm better than them" and increased mistrust and the idea "no one will ever accept me, so I'll have to fight them into letting me be, and that's just the way it is." I've mentioned that I already see Tom as someone who would have despised having no control over his own circumstances anyway, and this would just have exacerbated that.

So - clever boy and accomplished wizard that he was - he learned control over his abilities and saw them as the weapon to protect him from a world that would ground him up and spit him out otherwise. In his eyes, he can destroy the weak because that's what people would do to him if he were weak, and at some point he had to have started out as powerless, in his eyes "weak", and therefore, if how he reacts to weakness in others in any indication, he sees that younger self as something to despise.

There's more to this self-hatred than that, though. Yes, self-hatred. Certainly, Volemort has a magnificent image of himself and his abilities - because in his eyes that's when he's worthy of admiration, that's what he does well, those powers, that weapon, magic. When he's strong, he's special, he has vindicated himself just like he first did when he was a child and he grew stronger than the people who had bullied him, just like he did at eleven when he found out he was not being sent to an asylum but a school for special people who were stronger (and therefore better) than everybody else. This implies that if he is not strong, if he is not the best, he is not that image of himself anymore; in other words, it implies that he is only worthy of his own self-adoration when he's the most powerful guy around. (That's why, for both Riddle and Voldemort, Harry's existence immediately became more important to eradicate even than "Mudbloods." Harry threatens that image of himself.) When Tom is simply himself, without his abilities, that is worthy of dismissal. It is nothing.

The only thing he ever thought his own soul was good for was the ripping of it to pieces, because on some level he holds himself, separate from his power, to be of no value whatsoever.

So, self-hatred. Not just because of the aspects of his early life that I have already mentioned, in my opinion. Riddle would have known growing up that people out there, theoretically, could be looking for him. The only relative he knew to be dead was his mother. He knew he had a father who shared his name, and a grandfather named Marvolo. Harry doesn't even have that and he admits in the first book that he spends a lot of his time wishing someone would come and take him away from here; is it so far-fetched that Tom would once have privately wished the same thing, of his actual father? In the orphanage memory in book six, he showed himself to be so curious about his father that he blurted out, as if being unable to help himself, if the wizarding world had any recording of his father - who he was, where he was, what kind of wizard he was.

He also adds that his mother could not have been a witch because she died - and of childbirth, too. Here are my thoughts on that. Death has to have surrounded Tom his whole life. Everywhere, children coming into the orphanage and leading miserable lives because they lost their families to Death. In World War I, an unprecedented number of Europeans being lost to Death. Death has to have seemed like such a dreary Muggle inevitability to him, as so indicative of the grim prison-like place he grew up in, that by the time he hit eleven, he probably saw it as a Muggle weakness - surely, if magic could lift him above everything else, if it could do all these things and be all these things for him Muggles couldn't, surely it should be able to eradicate the concept of Death, too. Dumbledore also added the interesting theory that Voldemort sets on his victims things he fears himself (toward the end of book six while he and Harry are discussing Inferi in the cave) and the idea of Tom coming to fear dying makes sense given the kind of associations he must have had with Death growing up.

But he automatically assumes his father is a wizard, and therefore above the things like Death that his mother could not be. This automatic assumption reveals that, in some part of himself, Tom must have really built up the image of his father in his mind. Why wouldn't he secretly hope, especially as a young child, that his father would come to take him away from the orphanage?

I also find another idea interesting: other kids have to have been taken away from the orphanage by prospective Muggle families, but obviously we know Tom never was. When Tom thinks that "he could never stomach the small ones whining in the orphanage", we automatically get a picture of a child Tom kicking a little kid vindictively to make him cry. It's instinctive. But Dumbledore and Tom have both confirmed separately throughout the series that he was still spending his summers there as a teenager. What if the other kids around him eventually got taken away by families, and he never was? And was, furthermore, stuck in a poor, dreary orphanage with a bunch of orphaned little kids?

No wonder he tells himself he's "misunderstood" and "special." No wonder he's so wildly happy when he finds himself vindicated in this.

But he has covered up all these tendencies, as I said, by becoming powerful, which he associates with the only kind of good there is in the world. (We know that mental instability when angered also runs in at least one side of his family, so there's that.) And by the time he's eleven, he's turned into quite the little snot, and a very powerful wizard. He has so twisted himself and his perceptions of everything, he makes a boy's rabbit commit suicide because the boy had an argument with him. He tries to force people to tell them "the truth!", so mistrustful is he of people who are not him.

But I do wonder if on some level Tom did reach a point where he realized what he was capable of. During his defensive monologue with Dumbledore, he mentions the incident with Amy and Dennis. "I'm not insane and I never did anything to those two and you can ask them, they'll tell you!" Wow. Okay. I don't know about any of you, but I really want to know what happened with Amy and Dennis. Mrs. Cole says they were "never the same" after that time in the cave. Voldemort later in life found the site an important enough one that he left a Horcrux there - not in any other part of his childhood, but at the cave. Did some sort of realization happen there? Did he go so far that he actually wondered, on some level, what was wrong with him? Did he realize what he's capable of? It's an intriguing thought.

We also know that Tom collects "trophies" from his escapades - this one's simple enough. We don't know if as a child he had any worthwhile possessions besides the uniform tunics and books; he certainly doesn't seem to have. Taking "things" from other children when everyone had so little, keeping those things for himself, must have reassured him of the complete control or power he had over that person. We also know that it was very hard ever to catch Tom at anything growing up. Tom seems, therefore, to have defined "good" and "bad" by whether or not he can do it, or whether or not he would get caught and punished doing it. Out of all six of Kohlberg's Stages of Moral Development, this places Tom at the lowest developmental level, one, which is actually a good thing because it means he's not morally retarded (yet).

He will become so later, to the point where Harry's care-for-others-oriented soul not only confuses, but sometimes actually pains him to come into contact with. His own shredded "self", or soul, would also have come into play there.

So, all this and he's only poised at the threshold of Hogwarts.

He gets there, and he finds out he really is a special wizard pretty damn quickly. He's talented, he has an ability no one else has, it awes all his fellow house mates, and as long as he acts charming his teachers like him. (I think this is where he begins to put the acting ability he previously only used to get himself out of trouble into full practice, by beginning to charm people. You see, during his meeting with Dumbledore, Dumbledore not only forced Tom to pay for his deeds with an assertion of superior power and authority - which cannot have done much to convince Tom that the wizarding world was so magical, everyone just sort of loved each other and power didn't really matter as much - but he implied just before that, that when Tom acted like his mistrustful but open self and demanded a show, he didn't get it, but when Tom acted charming, he did get a show of magic.) He also gathers around himself a group of wizards, some even older than him, who admire him and will do what he tells them to do. He gains more power, which would make him more mistrustful and arrogant. He is linked indirectly to a number of "nasty incidents" over his years at Hogwarts, which means he learned fairly early on to exercise control over others who annoyed him, angered him, etc. He also learned that he could still do this, as long as he didn't get caught. He gained such a stark contrasting view between Hogwarts and the orphanage he still had to return to every summer that he began to get an Us vs Them mentality where Muggles are the enemies, the weaker ones; this, together with the views of the kind of company he kept (Avery, Lestrange, Nott - oh yeah, very neutral ground) would have poisoned him toward the views of the Dark naturally.

This means he would have felt incredible loathing, wondering, and self-consciousness over the Muggle side of his origins. When he finds out his father never went to Hogwarts - well, he knows Muggleborns exist by that point, he might assume that he's a Muggleborn with some famous ancestor going way back. This would explain the opening of the Chamber of Secrets in his fifth year, as an attempt to connect to that ancestor and carry out, not only what he sees as the man's own unfulfilled plan, but something that is in line with his own budding beliefs. Despite how reckless the whole thing is.

His eyes widened in surprise during book two when Dippet said they were going to close Hogwarts if the attacks didn't stop, but I sat there thinking, There's a random, unidentified monster - a possibly deadly, very ancient one - that's wandering around attacking students, Tom. What did you think they were going to do?

I don't think he was thinking; I think the decision was emotionally based in the aftermath of his realizations about his father. (Which does make me curious about the idea that he didn't kill anyone that first time opening the Chamber.) At least, not until Myrtle. I wonder about Myrtle. She has to have been mostly an accident. Tom's not retarded; making your first murder right next to the entrance of the Chamber of Secrets itself is not a very smart thing to do, and the circumstances she explains in book two make her death seem accidental to me. I highly doubt he knew she was there until she stepped out, looked the bloody thing in the eye, and dropped dead.

That would have been a bit of a surprise.

Now granted, I have no delusions that he was very torn-up over it. He was probably mostly worried that he would get caught, with his moral reasoning. I was thinking more along the lines of, His first murder abdicated him of the responsibility to have to actually, physically do anything in order to be a "murderer."

Which is what he must have considered himself. He could make a Horcrux out of it, couldn't he? And I find it interesting that even all the way back then, he was so willing to do the "horrific ritual" JKR has mentioned in order to make a Horcrux in the first place. Of course, he's a very pragmatic "if it works, do it" sort of person, but on some level I've also always seen that as an acceptance of his more insane tendencies, even as he sees himself as a special wizard. Add in the lack of value he puts to himself as a soul, the fact that it was around this time he donned the name of Lord Voldemort with his followers, and the fear of that looming, mundanely inevitable Death, and making his first Horcrux is probably the single most psychologically fucked-up thing Tom Riddle ever did, topping even murdering his own father.

Let's talk about the renaming of himself for a minute. I see the mask of Lord Voldemort as more than a desire to be different or notorious. Tom Riddle isn't just a name - it's who Tom saw himself as growing up. Harry thinks of himself as "Harry did this", "Harry said that." Well, Tom was Tom. It's who he's always been. The weak normality of the name and the connection of it to his shameful past combined means that by rejecting that name and making himself a new one, he's trying to make himself a new person - that new powerful person, that powerful wizard. He is trying to become the persona of Lord Voldemort. But he's not, really, and it shows. He often refers to Lord Voldemort in the third person, as if speaking of someone else, particularly when referring to himself at his most powerful. During the Godric's Hollow scene from his perspective, he not a name, he has no definite sense of self, so definitively has he shredded his soul - he does not refer to himself as Tom, or even Voldemort, he is simply "he." That one man.

I think that's why Voldemort has always been so angry at comments like Dumbledore calling him "Tom", or Dumbledore telling him he will never forget his youthful beginnings - he wouldn't get so angry if that reminder didn't, on some level, bother him. This, along with the loss of complete control he has over what Dumbledore calls him; like with the wardrobe so many years earlier, Dumbledore still has power over him. Only this time, it's his knowledge of who Voldemort once was. I contend that this and his love for Hogwarts explain Voldemort's strange hesitation to attack Hogwarts during the first war, and that it also explains Horcrux Tom Riddle's switch from a carefully careless, "He never seemed to like me" to a furious hiss of "Dumbledore's been driven out of this castle by the mere memory of me" when Harry dares to imply that Dumbledore is stronger even than the persona of Voldemort.

Switching topics, after all of this Tom Riddle/Voldemort finds out where his origins are and traces them back to Little Hangleton. The realization that the father whose image he built up in his head as a child, not only is Muggle, but abandoned him and his mother for being magical - different - and that his wizarding family is pathetic, and that his mother was a weak enough witch to have died, seems to have driven him over the edge. He actively kills this time, and makes another Horcrux, which strikes me as another very reckless, emotionally driven decision. After all, it is only in retrospect that he gets into Slughorn's good graces and asks him what would happen to the wizard who made more than one Horcrux. (Oops, right?)

On a side note, I also find it interesting that he trusts in his relationships with others so little - even the ones who clearly admire him - that he feels he has to buy Slughorn things and work toward the moment "possibly for weeks" before he can ask the question. And Dumbledore has said Riddle was closer to Slughorn than he was to any other teacher in the school.

Finally, Riddle asked to stay on at Hogwarts - "the only place he had ever been happy" - but was denied, and so went off to Borgin and Burkes. This in-between time strikes me as very interesting. By this point, he clearly had all the connections he needed to start out, he was clearly a very Dark wizard, he was clearly very into the Dark Arts, and by nature he has always had a lot of ambition. But he didn't start out as a Dark wizard immediately, or even try to become someone important. Instead, he works at Borgin and Burkes, studying artifacts and buying (or, you know, persuading) them from people, and even in retrospect that seems somewhat mysterious in motivations. Perhaps he wanted to look for more artifacts to create a "seven-part soul" in order to be as safe as possible before rising in power and doing the things that he, in his diary Horcrux's words, desired years before this. But even that doesn't make much sense, because Borgin and Burke wanted the artifacts for themselves. At most, he would have had to do what he ended up doing - steal a couple and take off. It doesn't seem worth it.

It's like he was stuck in this weird in-between place, not completely certain what to do. Of course, one reminder of his origins with that locket, and he's pushed over the edge. He kills, takes the artifacts, and is off.

This is the last time he displays Kohlberg's lowest form of moral development - directing the murder away from you and onto someone else, for example - and after that, at some point, he immerses himself so much in the Dark Arts and becomes so dedicated to his future as a Dark Lord that he tears his soul beyond complete repair, becomes morally retarded, and just starts doing whatever the hell he wants to whenever the hell he wants to do it.

And that moment is when he becomes Lord Voldemort.