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

by Langley, Travis

  The abundant rage he stores inside him, when it comes out, does so for obvious reasons having to do with what’s going on right now—situationally, not randomly, determined—and not in the form of unprovoked outbursts. Superman on the Couch author Danny Fingeroth says, “Batman does sit on top of this mountain of anger. I think he’s more in control of it than he wants his adversaries to think. He wants his adversaries to think he might lose it at any minute.”32 He dominates his anger. It does not run wild with him. If it did, he’d have gotten himself killed or he’d have beaten the Joker to death long ago. “For years a day hasn’t gone by where I haven’t envisioned taking him, taking him and spending an entire month putting him through the most horrendous, mind-boggling forms of torture,” Batman admits to Jason Todd, previously murdered by the Joker and now resurrected from the dead, a former Robin who can’t understand why Batman permits the Joker to live, “but if I do that, if I allow myself to go down into that place, I’ll never come back.”33

  His most prominent sign of hyperarousal regarding stimuli reminiscent of the original trauma, his hypervigilance (heightened readiness to spot danger), is appropriate to the life he leads. “Like a police officer walking a beat, or a detective taking part in an undercover operation, Batman has his ‘antennae’ up for possible danger, but hypervigilance is normal in that context. Batman is always on duty, and so it makes sense that he would be preternaturally attuned for possible threats.”34 Note again that his hypervigilance now comes out of his personality, his way of doing everything, not due to feelings of anxiety and stress.

  Criterion E: Symptom duration greater than one month. If—repeat, if—his adult functioning qualifies him for a posttraumatic mental illness, then yes, the disorder has persisted far beyond one month.

  Criterion F: Clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other functioning. He does not spend his days mired in a state of distress. He coolly, steadily, sometimes menacingly does the things he needs to do. Given the many traumas he faces almost daily, some distress will arise—that’s new stress, not the old.

  Not one psychologist or psychiatrist I know who also knows enough about the character would diagnose him with PTSD. “There are symptoms of it, not necessarily the full-blown disorder,” says forensic psychiatrist Praveen R. Kambam. “You have to meet all the criteria to make the disorder. I don’t think any of us are saying he has that fully. There are some things that he’s missing.”35 Does ongoing anxiety over his parents’ deaths keep Batman from functioning? As a vigilante crime-fighter, he functions beyond compare. As a philanthropist and socialite, he brings an array of social skills with which he charms the crowd. In interpersonal relationships, short on trust and shorter on intimacy, he has his deficits. His love life is sporadic and often lies dormant. Nobody’s perfect. In the areas where he functions worst, he does so because of ingrained personality traits and personal priorities, not because of crippling angst, panic, or anxiety states. “I’d argue that it reflects an exacerbation of previously existing traits,” says therapist Jeffrey Kramer. “Given all that he’s been through, he probably should have PTSD, but he clearly doesn’t.”36 In terms of Batman’s chosen life mission, nobody does it better.

  The one point in his adult career when Batman shows the most posttraumatic stress follows the death of Jason Todd, the boy who becomes the second Robin after Batman’s original sidekick, Dick Grayson, grows up. In the first Batman stories published after Jason dies, Batman does not appear to grieve (due, at least in part, to the fact that writers scripted these before DC knew whether Jason would live or die). On top of the controversy over the death itself, readers grumbled about Batman’s blunted response. As one reader noted, “His lack of reaction to Jason’s death could destroy him. We all need to grieve, and a failure to do so is catastrophic, emotionally and psychologically, for the grieving person…. It isn’t easy for the Batman to show emotion, as it’s a human weakness. If he bottles it up, however, it will eventually explode, and he himself will suffer most of all.”37 Batman grows angrier, more aggressive, more reckless, and less effective until Tim Drake, the third Robin, intervenes.38

  The Search for Meaning: “Why?”

  “Why did this happen?” victims will ask, “and why did this happen to me?”

  “Why?” is enormous. As any parent answering a child’s questions can tell you, answering one “Why?” can lead to another after another until you hit a wall of whys you can’t answer. Spectacular tragedy does not require a spectacular explanation—a loner with a grudge really can kill a president, shoot up a schoolyard, or crash a fuel truck into a crowd—and yet we feel like it should. We want cause to transcend effect. A simple truth can leave us feeling cheated. We need to believe in the existence of answers and purpose more powerful than our pain, in reasons and meaning bigger than the results.

  When tragedy challenges your worldview, you question your goals and beliefs. To make sense of injustice, we may draw one of three global conclusions: (1) People will get the justice they deserve; (2) there is no justice; or (3) justice happens but it needs our help. The first belief can give us peace. People who believe in a just world suffer less stress and depression, and enjoy life more than people who do not.39 Many cultures teach their members from childhood to believe the world operates with natural order and justice—the just-world phenomenon that psychologist Melvin Lerner says comforts us because most of us, even the worst of us, consider ourselves to be basically good and worthy of fair treatment.40 Our need to believe the world is just, however, can lead us to make unjust decisions: The crueler the fate, the more harshly we blame its victim.41 “That girl was asking for trouble with a bullhorn.” “He must have done something to deserve that.” “That’s what those high-society types get for thinking they’re better than us. What were they thinking, walking down that street at night?” The people who most need our compassion may instead receive our cruelest critiques.42 Believing in natural justice makes some people complacent, for they passively count on justice to happen on its own. People who believe we can create justice are more active, take-charge kinds of people, more ready to set aside their short-term self-interests and better able to stay motivated while working hard to satisfy long-term and less self-serving goals.43 Some of those who most actively pursue justice, not trusting it to happen on their own, feel a need to see it for themselves—thus does Bruce Wayne fight crime with his own fists instead of concentrating on supporting more citywide crime prevention programs for less than the price of a Batplane.

  Asking “Why?” does not give victims solace. Answering it might. Searching for meaning can stress the searcher and worsen PTSD symptoms before that person comes out the other side. Finding meaning predicts better adjustment.44 People who report posttraumatic growth (positive changes resulting from trauma) experience less depression and greater life satisfaction not by forgetting about the trauma but instead by dwelling on it in constructive ways. Numbing our feelings, refusing to acknowledge or think about bad things that have happened, all the dissociative tricks we play to protect ourselves instead of actively coping will predict more posttraumatic stress, not less.45 By feeling the negative emotions and recalling the unpleasant events, we might learn from them. Intrusive, unwanted ruminations that run ramshod over other thoughts can evolve into intentional contemplation. Such deliberation, in turn, may help a victim face the pain without drowning in it.46

  “Why?” goes beyond seeking a direct cause. Meaning making, finding value in tragedy or forging our own means to make it have positive repercussions, helps many people cope and may be critical for posttraumatic growth. A shakeup of your worldview can mark the starting point for eventual achievements.47 “Meaning making is very personal and may involve religion, renewed appreciation for life, or public service.”48 While we don’t know much about where the adult Batman stands on formal religion,49 we do know freshly orphaned Bruce Wayne draws strength from it: He makes meaning from his parents’ murders with a bedside prayer
in which he vows to wage war on all crime. “He makes meaning of trauma in a few days where it takes the rest of us several years.”50

  Victims dealt life-altering blows to their sense of self, family, and future frequently yearn for retribution.51 Whereas counterfactual “if only this hadn’t happened” fantasies in which the victim wishes for the past to change as if by magic can foster depression, future-oriented revenge plans can bolster the victim, reducing helplessness by empowering the person with a sense that he or she will become capable and take action. “People who have been harmed by another person are goaded into revenge by a brain system that hands them a promissory note certifying that revenge, when it comes, will make them feel good.”52 At his bedside days after his parents die, young Bruce Wayne’s promissory prayer trumps any feelings of powerlessness that might crush someone else.

  Social Superheroes

  Taking up a cause when inspired by a loved one’s death and making it one’s life’s work does not mean the person is mentally ill. Batman channels his grief for his parents into the campaign their deaths inspired, but he’s not alone in that regard. Real-world social superheroes, individuals whose misfortunes push them to levels of social activism that touch so many lives, find new purpose in life and make their losses meaningful by striving to keep others from suffering the same. They may follow their new purposes by raising public awareness of the problems, pushing for stricter laws and tougher penalties, lobbying for indirect deterrents like alcohol taxes, or even pursuing perpetrators.

  Outraged over the lenient sentence leveled against the drunk driver who killed her daughter in a hit-and-run, Candace Lightner made a vow, promising herself “that I would fight to make this needless homicide count for something in the years ahead,” and went on to found Mothers Against Drunk Drivers (MADD, later renamed Mothers Against Drunk Driving).53 The long-unsolved murder and decapitation of his six-year-old son Adam drove John Walsh to advocate for victims and help form the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.54 A young man engrossed in his cell phone call ran a red light and killed Linda Doyle, leading her daughter Jennifer Smith to found the group FocusDriven in order to combat distracted driving.55

  The Holocaust created many activists. Some made meaning by educating others about what happened. Elie Wiesel, after a decade unable to discuss his family’s death and his time in the Nazis’ Auschwitz concentration and extermination camp, finally wrote his memoirs and then kept writing. More than forty books followed, as did many awards, including a Nobel Peace Prize for speaking out against violence, racism, and oppression. Many scholars credit him for giving the name Holocaust to the Nazis’ genocidal crimes.56 Holocaust survivors include Nazi hunters like Simon Wiesenthal, Tuviah Friedman, and Efraim Zuroff dedicating their lives to tracking down war criminals because while evildoers yet live, it’s never too late to make them stand trial for their monstrous acts and make the monsters of the future beware.57

  When developing his realistic take on Batman, Christopher Nolan looked at a figure from earlier in history: “To me, the key to understanding the character is that Bruce Wayne is Teddy Roosevelt.”58 Like Bruce Wayne, Theodore Roosevelt was born into a wealthy urban family with a strong, philanthropic father he looked up to. To compensate for childhood weakness, asthma that kept him sickly and home-schooled, Roosevelt embraced a life of strenuous activity. Also like Bruce Wayne, Roosevelt experienced tragic family loss that drove him to fight injustice. Having already lost his father to a tumor, he lost mother and wife to different illnesses in the same house on the same day. For his diary entry that day, he drew a large X, under which he wrote, “The light has gone out of my life,”59 followed days later by “For joy or for sorrow my life has now been lived out.”60 He sold his house, left his newborn daughter with his sister, and headed into the Dakota Badlands61 apparently planning to die, but instead reforged himself and returned to New York to become an activist police commissioner bicycling through the city in the middle of the night, fighting police corruption, and tackling the terrible living conditions suffered by the city’s millions of poor immigrants.62 Before he became the President of the United States, he was the heroic Rough Rider.

  Personal tragedy does not drive all comic book superheroes (“Some of them become heroes because it’s just the right thing to do,” says comic book writer Len Wein),63 nor is it requisite to becoming a real-world social superhero. Witnessing online chat room participants attempt to groom young girls for sexual victimization prompted Xavier Von Erck to create Perverted-Justice, a computer watchdog agency that works with law enforcement and sometimes Dateline NBC’s “To Catch a Predator” operation to intercept sexual predators with the help of adult volunteers who pose online as minors.64

  Why does tragedy crush some people but fortify others? Why do some people fall and stay down while others rise to new heights?

  Bouncing Back

  The majority of people cope successfully with their traumas.65 Why some bounce back from adversity despite upbringing, environment, and great hardships,66 we don’t really know. Even though we can identify some factors correlated with resilience, the ability to adapt quickly to stress without lasting mental or physical ailments, we haven’t ferreted out the causal connections. Highly resilient individuals show greater morale, self-efficacy, self-reliance, perseverance, and purpose in life.67 Psychologically resilient individuals rebound from dwelling on pain by summoning positive emotions.68 They invigorate themselves.

  Social support helps—quality over quantity. For decades, the comic book stories largely avoided the question of who actually raised this rich orphan. Before Crisis on Infinite Earths reshuffled history, Bruce grows up on the estate of his Uncle Philip, a man rarely mentioned before the Crisis and, afterward, never comes up again. Post-Crisis, Batman: Year One established instead that the family butler, Alfred Pennyworth, becomes Bruce’s guardian. Dr. Leslie Thompkins, a family friend and physician running an inner-city clinic, the first person to notice Bruce at his parents’ murder scene and offer him any comfort, involves herself as a parental figure but not as a live-in guardian. It has always seemed like Bruce Wayne raised himself.

  In adulthood, Bruce has numerous father figures: Alfred Pennyworth, Commissioner Gordon, Lucius Fox, Henri Ducard. The eco-terrorist Ra’s al Ghul wants to squeeze himself into the mix. And his parents, in fractured memory, never leave him. In the comics, Bruce accesses the Batcave not by pole as in the 1966–1968 television series, but either by elevator or via secret passage behind a grandfather clock. He opens the passage by turning the clock’s hands to the hour and minute his parents died. Every time he changes from Bruce into Batman, he passes through the moment of their deaths.

  The Loss

  What exactly did Bruce lose? After all these years, we still know little about Bruce’s parents, who die when his story begins, and storytellers who show them via flashbacks depict them inconsistently. Of course, human beings are inconsistent. In presenting Bruce’s early memories, writers focus on his life shortly before the murders. Modern interpretations of Dr. Thomas Wayne69 often depict him as stern and distant at times when dealing with his son and yet unquestionably concerned for the well-being of family and others. Martha is more nurturing, as many mothers will be. Our weak knowledge of them reflects Bruce’s limited time in their company. Grown Batman’s memories of them come from the boy he’d been before they died. His father’s sternest moments could be exceptions that stand out against less memorable everyday affection.

  As an only child, young Bruce has no siblings with whom he had to share possessions or affection. His parents’ attention and time, he has to share with their social activities, their charitable commitments, his father’s work, and some travels they make without him. According to psychologist Alfred Adler, the pioneer researcher of birth order effects, an only child enjoys being the center of attention and is likely to have difficulty sharing with peers due to lack of experience sharing with siblings. An only child often prefers adult company
and uses more adult language because that it is familiar to them. For the only child’s parents, especially parents with resources, the child may be their precious miracle, whether because they have had difficulty previously having a child or because they finally reached the point in life when they actively chose to have one. Under these circumstances, the potential for overprotecting and spoiling the child is great.70 Adler stressed that he referred only to general tendencies, not universal rules, and that one must consider the entire context and the child’s life circumstances. Like Freud, Adler emphasized the importance of early years and experience, not only in terms of what happens but how the child interprets events. Adler felt that three basic childhood circumstances contribute to a faulty family lifestyle: health problems, pampering, or neglect. In Bruce Wayne’s case, he may have shifted from experiencing pampering due to his family’s sheer wealth even if his parents had handled it well to practical neglect by simply not having parents at all. Adler specifically discussed how orphans, abuse victims, and passively neglected children can experience similar deficits through the lack of a loving parent. Having had parents he loved, Bruce knows the pain and the void of what’s missing.