Batman and Psychology: A Dark and Stormy Knight (Wiley Psychology & Pop Culture)

by Langley, Travis

  3. Batman television series (March 7, 1968), episode 119, “The Entrancing Dr. Cassandra.”

  Case File 2–2: Mr. Freeze

  1. Batman television series (February 2, 1966), episode 7, “Instant Freeze.”

  2. Beginning with Detective Comics #373 (1968).

  3. Batman: The Animated Series (September 7, 1992), episode 14, “Heart of Ice.”

  4. Kübler-Ross (1969, 2005).

  5. Loughnan, Haslam, Murnane, Vaes, Reynolds, & Suitner (2010).

  aOnly in this version is Jack Napier the man who will become the Joker. In other versions, the Joker’s lack of any known alter ego is important.

  bBatman Forever spelled his surname Nygma even though it’s normally Nigma.

  cBatman & Robin’s great lesson: Men have nipples; women don’t. Decide for yourself what psychological issues figured into that costuming decision.

  3

  The Trauma

  “This is such a primal origin story. A kid watches his parents murdered in front of his eyes on a concrete altar of blood and at that moment sacrifices his childhood and makes a commitment, a commitment that he intends to honor even if he has to walk through hell for the rest of his life to get the guy who did this, to get all the bad guys…. It’s what everyone around the world can relate to: a powerful thing that motivates someone, that drives someone to the brink, that can make someone put on a bat mask, that can get us all to suspend our disbelief and believe in Bruce Wayne and take this journey with him, and it all starts with the origin.”

  —Michael Uslan, The Dark Knight Rises executive producer1

  For his first six months of publication, Batman had no origin. He was a shadowy figure who fought crime and solved mysteries for no apparent reason, atypical for early comic book superheroes but consistent with some of the pulp magazine figures that had inspired creators Bob Kane and Bill Finger. The Shadow fought crime in the pulps for years before readers even learned his true identity, much less how he’d come to know what evil lurks in the hearts of men. In November, 1939, Detective Comics #33 opened with “The Legend of the Batman—Who He Is and How He Came to Be!” A father, mother, and son, after a night out at the movies, walk together down a city street. A gunman demands the wife’s necklace. The husband moves to protect her. Gunshots. He dies. She dies. Their son stands alone in tears. The narrative tells us, “The boy’s eyes are wide with terror and shock as the horrible scene is spread before him.” Days later, the boy Bruce kneels at his bedside, hands clasped in prayer by candlelight as he swears by his parents’ spirits that he will “avenge their deaths by spending the rest of my life warring on all criminals”—avenge, not revenge. Within the fictional biography of Bruce Wayne, this is where Batman begins. Over the years, other details crept in—the father, Thomas Wayne, became a doctor, the unnamed mother became Martha, and their killer became Joe Chill—but six powerful panels out of a tale barely a page and a half long already told readers everything they needed to know to understand what propelled the Wayne son into his crusade against crime. Finger and Kane had contemplated other explanations for what could have turned Bruce Wayne into a costumed vigilante.2 “Bill and I discussed it,” Bob Kane recalled, “and we figured there’s nothing more traumatic than having your parents murdered before your eyes.”3

  “Nothing More Traumatic”

  Trauma involves (1) experiencing actual or threatened death or serious injury to oneself or others and (2) reacting to this horrific event with intense fear, helplessness, or horror. A tragic event is not necessarily traumatic. The world’s three best-known superheroes—Superman, Batman, and Spider-Man—are all orphans, and all their origins include defining moments centered on their parental losses: The infant Kal-El rockets away from his exploding home planet; the boy Bruce Wayne drops to his knees, wide-eyed at his parents’ murders; and the teenager Peter Parker, already Spider-Man though not yet a hero, gripping the burglar who has slain Pete’s Uncle Ben, realizes with horror that he has seen this man before, that he could have easily prevented the death of the man who raised him.4 Their respective tragedies traumatize Bruce and Peter, but not so for the Kryptonian tot. Saved from disaster by birth parents who die with their world, Kal-El flies through space, listening to Krypton’s version of Your Baby Can Read, blissfully unaware of catastrophe. Raised by a loving farm couple who find his rocket in a Kansas field, the child they name Clark Kent grows up without knowing his origin until he’s at the brink of manhood, and even when he learns it, Krypton’s destruction is remote history, like a story in a book.5 This disconnect from his homeworld and the fact that he’d been a baby at the time will keep Superman from suffering the kind of survivor guilt that might drive Batman and definitely burdens Spider-Man: that feeling of guilt for having survived when others did not and blaming oneself for wanting to see a movie, for letting a burglar get away, for any action great or small on his part, whether realistic or not, that could conceivably have altered the course of events and allowed everyone else to live.6 Superman gets to feel blessed where Spider-Man feels cursed, and so for different reasons each knows that with great power comes great responsibility. What, then, pushes Bruce, the boy with an inherited fortune and no superpowers, to build himself into a crime-fighter and take on responsibility for protecting others?

  Many who research the impact of losing one’s parent or parents when old enough to know about it rank that as the single most stressful common life event children can experience.7 Uncommon traumas like torture or terrorist attacks are not universal experiences, not things most of us anticipate, but sooner or later we all learn that our parents can and will die. Life event stress checklists for children (based on Holmes and Rahe’s still-influential stress scale, their Social Readjustment Rating Scale or Schedule of Recent Events)8 place losing a parent at the very top. Unlike other calamities, losing parents deprives the child of the nurturance, love, and support that might help that child get through other kinds of hard times. For adults, losing a spouse tops that list. Losing your child might upset you more, but losing your spouse upends your life more broadly; among other things, a young child almost certainly didn’t help you make ends meet. What’s traumatic or stressful for one person might not be for another. That which inflicts distress (bad stress) upon one person might bestow eustress (good stress) upon another, even in the case of parental death. A sadistic parent’s passing might free victimized family members to start a new and better life or, conversely, evil offspring like Superman’s archenemy Lex Luthor or Batman’s foe Hush might revel in a parent’s elimination.9 Starting a new life is stressful no matter how much you need it. Change is stressful. The recurring theme across all the different lists of stress factors (marriage, divorce, a huge win, a huge loss, new employment, unemployment, Christmas) is change.

  Children who lose their parents to homicide experience complicated bereavement processes. Many evince debilitating posttraumatic stress symptoms, a difficulty especially common among those who witnessed the homicide.10Observers to their parents’ murders may display their emotional scarring through tantrums, flashbacks, sleep disturbances, anxiety, dissociation, passiveness, and aggression, or with shocking images, thoughts, and memories, often finding themselves haunted by the murderer’s impulsiveness, the victim’s suffering, the visible injuries, and their own lack of power.11

  When you’re a child, losing your parents rewrites your world. If you had a loving parent, your everyday life is now absent that love, or had they been unloving, any wish to win their affection and approval during this lifetime goes forever unfulfilled. Indirect losses both emotional and practical will follow. Parental loss likely becomes not one stressor but a series of hassles and pains: loss of parent, loss of resources, loss of old acquaintances, change of residence, increase in responsibilities, and adjustment to either a surviving parent’s own changes or a new caregiver’s ways.12 You wonder what will become of you. Losing a sibling, while dreadful, does not endanger your everyday existence. Losing your parents does—and i
f you witnessed their deaths, you probably feared for your own life at the time. Subsequent fears both rational and irrational can ensue, even the dread, however illogical, that the killer might hunt you down, and so nightmares disturb your peace. Some bereaved children act out,13 misbehaving out of resentment toward a new caregiver for not being the old or toward the whole unfair world because the parent’s death and the consequent life upheaval threaten that child’s needs for connection, competence, self-worth, and control.14 Thinking less abstractly than adults do and less able to articulate their feelings, bereaved children tend to express any anger and anxieties behaviorally.15 Fortunately that tendency helps them to heal as well because they’re also more likely to work out their feelings and concerns through activities like art, games, schoolwork, and stories.16

  Elisabeth Kübler-Ross derived five stages of grief (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance) from her interviews with 500 dying patients, originally applying these stages to terminal illness and later to any catastrophic personal loss, including bereavement over losing loved ones.17 This set of stages lacks consistent confirmation by empirical research,18 manifests less universally than commonly thought (people can skip stages, get stuck, go back and forth, or follow different processes entirely),19 and can work differently for young children, who, even if they know what death means, do not understand it the way adults do. A child’s mourning process may be incomplete because (1) a grieving child may lose some of his or her self-concept because the child derives much identity through parental modeling and interactions, (2) role conflicts may occur for a bereaved child who makes an effort to replace the dead parent by assuming family roles previously held by that parent, (3) memorializing the dead parent may figure prominently into the child’s process of growing up, and (4) the child may interpret the death as abandonment or supernatural punishment for the child’s own misdeeds,20 although treating maturational grief (intermittent grief arising from life-cycle milestones) as incomplete grief (relatively continuous, acute grief) might be a mistake. Losing parents during childhood is a different kind of milestone than losing them when you’re an adult, and it alters other milestones. Childhood loss of a parent commonly leads to surges in grief years after the loss as the individual feels the absence sharply at points peers can still share with their own parents. Bruce Wayne avoids some such experiences by diverging from his peers and creating milestones unique to himself. While his childhood friends finish high school, he studies martial arts on the other side of the world. He never passes through Kübler-Ross’s five stages: He never denies what happened—he immediately knows, “They’re gone”—and he never dwells in depression. He gets mad, he accepts that this is his new reality, and the only bargain he makes is a vow to stay mad and avenge them, not some plea for their impossible return.

  Posttraumatic Stress Disorder

  Does Batman have posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD)? Some people think so.21 He broods, he’s aloof, he’s a grown man who dons a mask and regularly replays his parents’ murder in his mind decades after they died. These add up to PTSD, right? Maybe not. A person can show some symptoms of a mental disorder without fully qualifying for a clinical diagnosis. Reliving that catastrophic event and letting it rule his life might suggest so. Trauma of human design—rape, torture, terrorism, and certainly a double murder over a pearl necklace—provokes PTSD more easily than disasters or human error.22 The longer the trauma, the greater its impact tends to be. It wears you down. Even though both his parents die in a flash, young Bruce’s time alone with their bodies on that street before help arrives must itself be harrowing, as must hearing the sirens, watching the police gather, answering questions, seeing graphic news footage, and repeatedly experiencing the disappointment of learning that no progress has been made in the case because, in most versions of the story, the Waynes’ killer never faces justice for that particular crime.

  Posttraumatic stress disorder,a as its name implies, refers to anxiety suffered long after a traumatic event has occurred—so obviously, in fact, that even some professionals can make the mistake of overlooking the other word in that name: disorder. We have to look at whether the trouble is maladaptive—does it keep someone from adapting to life? Does it render that person unable to function? Trauma and subsequent stress over it don’t prove that a person has the disorder any more than a week spent grieving deeply gets someone diagnosed as having major depression. Whether a given problem counts as a psychiatric disorder, a mental illness, depends on severity, frequency, number, duration, distress, and type of reported symptoms. You can function poorly in many ways without meeting the criteria for any specific mental disorder.

  When is posttraumatic stress pathological? The American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV23 or DSM-IV-TR24)b lays out specific criteria.

  Criterion A: Trauma. Yes, the event that created Batman (1) involved death or physical danger and (2) horrified the survivor.

  Criterion B: Persistent re-experiencing. Yes, Bruce re-experiences his parents’ murders through recurrent, vivid recollections and some of his responses when exposed to cues reminiscent of the event. Nightly he seeks out criminals whose actions reflect those of his parents’ killer, maybe to make himself face his old fears or maybe to make sure he never stops feeling them. Many individuals suffering survivor guilt report feeling wrong, as if they have betrayed whomever they have lost, when they find they do not feel the old grief and fear as intensely. Many a Batman comic book story begins with him intervening in a mugging. Feelings evoked by these memories and flashbacks, when they come to him normally (i.e., not when he’s loopy from exhaustion or hallucinating because of a villain’s mind-altering gas), do not enfeeble him. According to one psychologist, the memories “don’t usually come to him unbidden; that is, they aren’t intrusive, and he usually retrieves the memories in a normal way,”25 although I’m not so sure. So many cues trigger those memories on his best day, much less every time he’s ever feverish, exhausted to the point of confusion, or suffering exposure to hallucinogens (his enemies hit him with those a lot).c Then his mind always trots right back to his fears, usually his parents’ deaths. Most of us would show greater variety in our hallucinatory content. Furthermore, as we’ll discuss shortly, intrusive thoughts contribute to some people’s posttraumatic growth.

  Criterion C: Persistent avoidance and emotional numbing. No, he does not avoid reminders of the murders. In fact, his crime-fighting efforts immerse him in reminders. He does not suppress thoughts, avoid feelings, or refuse to have any conversations regarding the trauma. While he eschews the use of guns because they remind him of his parents’ deaths, he faces these and other weapons all the time. His active pursuit of situations reminiscent of their murder could, in fact, be counterphobic behavior (actions that help combat phobic inclinations by facing feared stimuli instead of trying to escape or avoid them) in that he seeks out the things that most frightened his younger self: criminals and bats. He visits “Crime Alley,” as the site of his parents’ death becomes known, on every anniversary of when his parents’ blood christened it so.d

  Numbing of general responsiveness gets complicated. He responds to his environment, but he’s guarded. He has feelings even though his general stoicism and frequently inadequate expression of how he really feels might give impressions otherwise. A diagnostician will look at specific symptoms in this area:Markedly diminished interest or participation in significant activities: During the months after the murders, this might have applied, as may be true of many other symptoms. We don’t know that much about his everyday childhood, and when we don’t know, we oughtn’t guess or judge. No, his devotion to crime-fighting replaced many of his previous interests, but putting away childhood interests and activities also happens as part of growing up. His interests and enjoyments changed. He takes great interest in the activities that now mean the most to him, the ones he personally finds most significant. However much Lucius Fox and the Wayne Enterprise
s board members might like for him to get more involved in the family business, he—much like his father—has never gotten engrossed enough in the business in the first place to call his interest in it diminished. He’s no recluse too timid, melancholy, or indifferent to venture out.

  Feeling of detachment or estrangement from others: Yes, at one point or another, he estranges everyone in his life.

  Restricted range of emotions: Not really. Admittedly, he doesn’t laugh much when he’s in the mask. His difficulty conveying his feelings often interferes with his relationships with sidekicks and any woman he loves—but he does have those feelings. “Psychic numbing” or “emotional anesthesia” usually starts soon after the traumatic event, when Bruce shows emotion aplenty. He cries when his parents die, he cries later as well, and he summons a mighty anger. “Batman reflects the full spectrum of emotional angst and joy and sorrow that each and every one of us experience in life.”27

  Sense of foreshortened future: No. Children with PTSD may show a sense of foreshortened future, as indicated by a belief that life will be too short to include becoming an adult—a symptom certainly not demonstrated by young Bruce. In point of fact, his sense of future grows.

  Criterion D: Persistent symptoms of arousal not present before. Here’s a tricky area because a grown man shows many traits he didn’t show before age 8. After experiencing the shock of the murders, this boy becomes less fearful, less anxious, less easily startled or surprised than ever before. Bad dreams still disturb his adult sleep sometimes, but otherwise he usually sleeps solidly, especially when the sun’s out. “Bats are nocturnal!”28 Combat veterans who suffer nightmares, often fearing sleep itself29 or waking in distress even from non-dreaming portions of the night,30 suffer far worse than he.31 Bruce Wayne runs on insufficient sleep when he gets too busy—when current, not posttraumatic, circumstances intrude. His ability to focus his concentration exceeds that of most people’s.