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

by Langley, Travis

  When Bruce loses his parents, he loses milestone experiences his wealthy peers even had in common with children of the working class. Grown, he lacks deep and enduring relationships with any who don’t know him as Batman. Bruce Wayne plays the role of a charitable but carefree playboy, perhaps a representation of the kind of man he imagines he might have become. The persona he presents when he is not wearing the mask puts forth a greater deception than his features hide beneath his cowl.

  His parents’ murder stays in Batman’s head. Detective Comics #457 cover by Dick Giordano © DC Comics.

  Notes

  1. Langley et al. (2011).

  2. Kane & Andrae (1989), 104.

  3. Daniels (1999), 31.

  4. Action Comics #1 (1938); Detective Comics #33 (1939); Amazing Fantasy #15 (1962).

  5. Action Comics #1 (1938); Superman #61 (1949); The Man of Steel (1986).

  6. Porter (1981).

  7. For example, Monaghan, Robinson, & Dodge (1979).

  8. Holmes & Rahe (1967).

  9. Smallville, episode 148, “Descent;” Superman: Secret Origin #2 (2009); Batman #619 (2003).

  10. Clements & Burgess (2002); Eth & Pynoos (1994); Malquist (1986); Parson (1995).

  11. Burman & Allen-Meares (1994).

  12. Wolchik, Ma, Tein, Sandier, & Ayers (2008); Wolchik, Tein, Sandier, & Ayers (2006).

  13. Thompson, Kaslow, Kingree, King, Bryant, & Re (1998).

  14. Sandier (2001); Skinner & Wellborn (1994).

  15. O’Toole & Cory (1998).

  16. Corr, Nable, & Corr (1997); Goldman (1998).

  17. Kübler-Ross (1969, 2005).

  18. Bonanno (2001, 2007).

  19. Lindstrm (2002).

  20. Johnson & Rosenblatt (1981).

  21. Cengage (n.d.); Chan (2009); Superherologist (2011).

  22. Allen (1999).

  23. American Psychiatric Association (1994).

  24. American Psychiatric Association (2000).

  25. Rosenberg (2008b), 149.

  26. DSM-IV-TR, 468.

  27. Phillips (2008).

  28. Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) to Alfred (Michael Caine) in Batman Begins (2005 motion picture).

  29. Lu, Wagner, Van Male, Whitehead, & Boehnlein (2009).

  30. Harb, Cook, Gehrman, Gamble, & Ross (2009).

  31. Shore, Orton, & Manson (2009).

  32. Fingeroth (2008).

  33. Batman #650 (2006).

  34. Rosenberg (2008b), 151.

  35. Kistler (2010).

  36. Kramer (2005).

  37. Bourne (1989) in Batman #440.

  38. Batman: Year Three (1989).

  39. Lipkus, Dalbert, & Siegler (1996).

  40. Lerner (1980); Lerner & Miller (1978).

  41. Burger (1981); Valor-Seguar, Exposito, & Moya (2011).

  42. Lerner & Simmons (1966).

  43. Lipkus (1991); Zuckerman & Gerbasi (1977).

  44. Park (2010).

  45. Ehlers, Mayou, & Bryant (1998); Griffin, Resick, & Mechanic (1997); Harvey, Bryant, & Dang (1998).

  46. Dekel (2011); Helgeson, Reynolds, & Tomich (2006); Triplett, Tedeschi, Cann, Calhoun, & Reeve (2011).

  47. Calhoun, Cann, & Tedeschi (2010).

  48. Wortmann (2009); Oltmanns & Emery (2012), 172.

  49. Experts contemplating Batman’s religiosity and spiritual value include Asay (2012); Brewer (2004); Garrett (2008); Lewis & Kraemer (2010); Oropeza (2006); Saunders (2011).

  50. Rosenberg in Langley et al. (2011).

  51. Bayer, Klasen, & Adam (2007); Haen (2009); Horowitz (2007); Orth, Montada, & Maercker (2006).

  52. McCullough (2008), 146.

  53. Carruth & Valle (1986).

  54. Walsh (2008).

  55. Jones (2010).

  56. Finkelstein (2000).

  57. Walters (2010).

  58. Quoted by Levitz (2008).

  59. Roosevelt (February 14, 1884).

  60. Roosevelt (February 17, 1884).

  61. Library of Congress (n.d.)

  62. Morris (2002, 2010); Riis (1901).

  63. Letamendi et al. (2011).

  64. Salkin (2006).

  65. Bonanno et al. (2011).

  66. Wingo, Fani, Bradley, & Ressler (2010).

  67. Caltabiano & Caltabiano (2006); Nygren, Alex, Jonsen, Gustafson, Norberg, & Lundman (2005); Wagnild & Young (1993); Wagnild & Collins (2009).

  68. Ong, Zautra, & Reid (2010); Zautra, Arewasikporn, & Davis (2010).

  69. For example, Batman: Year One (1987); Secret Origins trade paperback (1989); Batman: The Long Halloween (1996–1997).

  70. Adler (1924).

  aPosttraumatic in the American Psychiatric Association’s DSM or post-traumatic in the World Health Organization’s ICD-10.

  bDiagnostic criteria did not change between DSM-IV and DSM-IV-TR. The TR (text revision) part refers to information the APA tweaked in the manual’s text (for example, by mentioning new research findings on whether certain disorders are likely to run in families) without reworking the diagnostic system.

  c“…lethal Laughing Gas, mind-control lipstick, Fear Dust, toxic aerosols, and ‘artificial phobia’ pills. Indeed, his career had barely begun before he was heroically inhaling countless bizarre chemical concoctions cooked up by black-market alchemists.”—Morrison (2011), 21.

  dFacing one’s fears, however, does not require relentless rumination over them. Batman eventually decides to celebrate their lives more than their deaths by starting a new personal tradition of honoring them on their wedding anniversary instead of “marking the night I watched my father bleed out from his sucking chest wound and my mother from a hole in her throat” (Batman and Robin #1, 2011).

  4

  Why the Mask?

  “But then I found out about your mask.”

  —Rachel Dawes (Katie Holmes), Batman Begins (2005 motion picture)

  We wear masks. You wear a different set of traits to your grandmother’s birthday party than what you’d bring to haggle over the price of a used car. While you’re reading this book, you might also be logged on to websites, whether multitasking or awaiting a beep or a tweet that could summon your online persona like the Commissioner on the Batphone calls upon the Dynamic Duo to don those tights. After Bruce decides to combat crime, why does he then decide to fight it wearing a mask?

  Wearing a mask is a deliberate choice, not some habit he picks up without realizing it. Bruce Wayne’s conscious decision to fight crime as a masked vigilante reflects his cognitive and moral growth, how he develops the kind of logic that deems this path reasonable, and the kind of morality that considers it the right thing to do. Although his origin story shows the moment he chooses to use a bat as his symbol, there is no similarly famous realization that he needs to wear a mask. That decision evolved over the course of more than a decade for him.

  Bruce doesn’t start off intending to work outside the law. He considers law enforcement and law school until he comes to decide that law itself can impede the pursuit of justice. He attends college, several colleges in fact, only to drop out each time he reaches the point where he feels he has learned as much as he can use. He enters FBI training only to quit after six weeks, frustrated over having learned nothing more than obeying regulations, dressing neatly, analyzing statistics, and writing reports. “The experience confirmed a suspicion he’d long had: He could not operate within a system. People who caused other people to fall did not recognize systems.”1 Traveling the globe, he learns from every instructor, sensei, and expert who can impart the knowledge and cultivate the skills he needs, along with every eminent detective in the world, including French detective Henri Ducard, whose smug amorality appalls the hero-to-be.

  Intense physical training elevates him to the pinnacle of human potential, “a perfection reached by few,” as artist Neal Adams put it. “He became such a physical specimen as would make a Spartan wonder, and if he entered the Olympics, he would win, place, and show in every event.”2 Neuroscientist, kinesiologist, and
martial artist E. Paul Zehr, in meticulously examining the rigorous training and mental discipline necessary to become Batman, concludes that “a person could become Batman (notice I said a person, not necessarily you or I). This person would need to have the proper blend of genetic endowment, be driven at a fanatical level by some passionate goal, and have inordinate amounts of time and money to undertake all the extreme privations and training needed…. However, the caveat is that it would be enormously difficult to actually be Batman.”3 Repeated physiological stress and frequent injuries incurred bounding across rooftops, pummeling foes, and getting pummeled in return would make a costumed crime-fighting career all too brief. As long as Batman feels to us like someone who could in any way exist in the first place, we as readers will suspend our disbelief regarding much of what follows. This realistic potential lets readers accept Batman as logically possible. We don’t scoff at the accumulated effects and logistical impossibility of one man having thousands of adventures as long as we can accept him as the man in the adventure he’s having right now and as the boy in the tragedy where it all began.

  Cognitive Development: Thinking Batty Thoughts

  Long before he makes the crazy-sounding decision to run around dressed like a bat, Bruce Wayne first makes the decision to wage war on all criminals—a goal in some ways crazier than wearing a mask because one person cannot fight all criminals. To understand how the decision to fight crime anonymously evolved somewhere in between those two points, we should look at how his general thinking ability developed. The moment his parents die, he is already Batman even if he has not yet figured that out. He immediately grasps the meaning of what has occurred and quickly forms his life’s goal in response.

  Unlike a much younger child who thinks death is as reversible as sleep if aware of it at all,4 Bruce is old enough when his parents die that he can already recognize the concrete and permanent reality of that loss as well as its basic wrongness. His eyes wide with shock and horror as he utters, “Dead. They’re d-dead,” his lesson is not that death happens but that it happens to people you love. He discovers its universality when it rearranges his universe. Unlike the case of a much older child, however, not so many of the complexities of life have crept their way into his head as to make him feel daunted days later by the magnitude of his avenging oath’s intent. His thinking has picked up enough logic to know exactly what happened and too little logic to let common sense stop him from tackling a nigh-impossible task. The imagination he hasn’t outgrown has picked up some tools to help it create new reality.

  Young Bruce immediately understands the horror and makes meaning of it. © DC Comics.

  Cognition, meaning all mental activities including thinking, knowing, and remembering, develops in stages, according to Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget.5 An infant in the sensorimotor stage takes in the world through sensory and motor interactions, coming to discover how his or her physical movements coordinate with input from vision, touch, and other senses regarding the environment. The infant will grasp, mouth, look, and hear, absorbing information about the chaotic and surprising environment faster than at any other time of life. From about age two until six or seven, during the preoperational stage, before picking up better comprehension and reasoning skills (operations), the child relies on intuition and imagination rather than logic. The preoperational child has an egocentric (self-centered) perspective, not the kind of selfish shortsightedness people mean when they refer to adolescent or adult egocentrism with its difficulty seeing someone else’s point of view. The preoperational child generally fails to recognize that others perceive concrete surroundings from an angle other than their own. Ask a four-year-old sitting across the table eating from a bowl of cereal while you read a book, “What’s the first thing you see on the table?” The child probably says the cereal. Next ask, “What’s the first thing I see on the table?” The child probably repeats, “Cereal.” This child has limited ability to think symbolically (i.e., letting one thing, a symbol, represent something else) and lacks the concept of conservation, the principle that objects don’t lose their basic nature—their mass, volume, or number—through superficial changes like moving them around. Pouring water from a tall, thin glass into a short, fat one doesn’t reduce the amount of water, nor does cutting a piece of pie in half give the child more pie. Some seven-year-olds get that; some don’t. By age eight, most understand these easily.

  Before he witnesses the murders and swears his oath, Bruce has already entered the concrete operational stage (about age six or seven until puberty), during which he is gaining the reasoning skills that will let him use basic logic to think about events in the physical world. Because most writers make him eighta when his parents die, he has freshly embarked upon accumulating his concrete operations, his simple logic skills for contemplating actual (concrete) objects or events that are not abstract or hypothetical. His fantasy of avenging his parents grows up with his logic. It likely becomes a frame of reference and a focal point about which his mind practices each new reasoning skill, ensconcing the avenging mission in the very way his thoughts function. By the time he reaches the next stage, the mission already defines him like music defined child prodigy Mozart. Preteen reasoning begins to expand beyond actual concrete experience to encompass abstractions and ideals. Some adolescents advance farther into formal operations than others.6 Some adults will distrust cold reason. Regardless of how well they individually fulfill the potential, Piaget believed adolescents have within their grasp the ability to develop hypotheses (reasoned guesses about how to solve problems) and systematically deduce a path to each problem’s solution—a cognitive ability Piaget called hypothetico-deductive reasoning, at which Bruce Wayne becomes a master. Before he goes out solving crimes, he has already become a great detective able to think through complicated sets of clues to generate hypotheses and deduce information regarding crimes that have taken place in the past and those his enemies are planning for the future.

  Concrete operations let Bruce consider practical reasons for becoming a masked vigilante, such as the fact that search and seizure laws won’t keep him from discovering evidence the police can’t obtain. Formal operations let him anticipate ripple effects, as the lives he touches will touch others as well, and see the potential for a symbol to inspire people in many ways. Formal operations also complicate some decisions for him because, instead of the simple good/evil classifications that categorized people early in his concrete operations, he now understands abstractions, complexities, extenuating circumstances, and the fact that people can do bad things for good reasons.

  Moral Development: Growing a Hero’s Conscience

  Piaget made observations about how cognitive development shapes morality, setting and then breaking limits on the child’s ability to comprehend and utilize moral concepts. The infant starts out in a state of amorality, lacking morals, not to be confused with immorality, which involves knowingly violating morals. From about ages four to seven as Piaget perceived children, they’re in a state of heteronymous (other-defined) morality, when they come to recognize that morals, rules, and laws exist, and conceive of them as properties of reality as immutable as Earth’s gravity and fire’s heat—so Thomas and Martha Wayne died at a time when Bruce most readily accepted their moral values, when he considered justice to be straightforward and easily defined. Later on, around age 10, children recognize that because people create rules and laws, those rules and laws can change, and thus the child moves into a more independent or autonomous (self-defined) moral view, considering intentions, not just consequences, as that individual comes to mature.7 Bruce establishes his own moral code and decides he can honor his parents’ values even through means of which they might have disapproved.

  Lawrence Kohlberg expanded on Piaget’s writings about morality, refining and building his own theory about stages of moral development. Whereas Piaget named the cognitive stages for mental operations, Kohlberg named his theorized moral stages for the person’s progression through mor
al conventions. He saw three levels of morality—preconventional, conventional, and postconventional—with two distinct stages within each for a total of six stages, with not everyone reaching the highest or most advanced. Despite their placement in table 4.1, these do not adhere to a specific timetable as neatly as some aspects of development: People can operate on more than one level at the same time, some morally deficient individuals barely function on any level at all, and moral action may be less dependent on reasoning ability than Kohlberg expected.8 Before the murders, Bruce has progressed through two stages of preconventional morality, that time of life when the person shows no internalization of moral values, when the person’s earliest sense of morality was learning to avoid punishment and earn rewards. Stage 1 morality is often tied to punishment. Those in stage 2 pursue their own interests and learn to let others do the same. What is right involves an equal exchange, within the child’s skewed perspective of what’s equal: Be nice to others so they’ll be nice to you. Before age nine, most children reason about moral dilemmas in a preconventional way—most, not all. Bruce is an exceptionally bright child whose philanthropic parents emphasize the importance of looking out for others. Even if the boy has not yet advanced into conventional morality, he is surely ready.