The first edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders treated sociopathy as a whole category of different mental illnesses for people “ill primarily in terms of society and of conformity with the prevailing cultural milieu,”47 a category that included antisocial reaction, dyssocial reaction, addiction, and sexual deviation—not the contemporary view. A non-sociopath can have some addictions and paraphilias (the modern psychiatric term for sexual deviations, conditions in which the person is unable either to experience or enjoy the normal sexual response cycle without actions or imagery most people consider bizarre) without being a criminal. As long as you and your consenting adult partner have fun with your whips, chains, stilettos, balloons, pastries, puppets, garden tools, or whatnot together in the privacy of your own home, there’s nothing antisocial about that. Even if it interferes with your ability to enjoy mature relationships to the point that it qualifies as a mental disorder, you haven’t necessarily violated anybody else’s rights. Modern writers tend to use the poorly defined term sociopath interchangeably with psychopath. “The purist, however, considers the sociopath a habitual criminal offender who has not been properly socialized.”48 Those who make distinctions may treat sociopathy as a product of environment, less deeply rooted than psychopathy, or view the sociopath as being more capable of interpersonal bonds like loyalty even as they hurt outsiders. Ra’s al Ghul sometimes calls Batman a sociopath. “He will be grieving, but he will most likely lean on his sociopathic nature,”49 al Ghul says, a remark that fits some meanings of sociopath but not others. Keep in mind, the 500-year-old eco-terrorist may not have read a DSM since 1952.
Venn Diagram of the Evil Disorders. The figure reflects how psychopathy, sociopathy, and antisocial personality disorder overlap in their definitions, not in terms of population distribution.
These days, the greater issue diagnostically is distinguishing antisocial personality disorder (APD) from psychopathy. APD is a DSM diagnosis, psychopathy is not, and yet many therapists and criminologists concentrate on psychopathy as the more meaningful construct when trying to understand evil. An antisocial personality disorder diagnosis focuses more on objectively assessable actionsd (lawbreaking, deceitfulness, impulsivity, aggressiveness, recklessness, irresponsibility), with the specific trait of remorselessness as just one of the possible symptoms. Psychopathy places greater emphasis on internal qualities, specific emotional and interpersonal qualities like grandiose self-concept, lack of empathy, and rejection of responsibility for one’s own behavior. Psychopathy’s essential quality is lack of conscience: They should know the difference between right and wrong, but at heart they don’t understand it and they don’t care. The criminal psychopath regularly breaks laws, as opposed to other psychopaths who, despite their lack of empathy or moral concerns, might have other reasons for not committing numerous criminal or antisocial acts.
Because the DSM defines APD in terms of antisocial actions, based largely on earlier studies of prison inmates’ characteristics, the majority of inmates meet its criteria.50 This should come as no surprise. Test developers who create assessment tools based on thousands of previous criminals’ answers should find it no more shocking or impressive when later criminals produce high scores than if most mimes nod yes a lot while completing an Are You a Mime? questionnaire. Criminality is not an essential component of psychopathy,51 even though Hervey Cleckley interviewed incarcerated psychopaths for The Mask of Sanity, his landmark book that laid the groundwork for defining and studying psychopathy.52 The title refers to the social “mask” that conceals the true nature of psychopaths who outwardly mimic normally functioning persons. Cleckley identified numerous traits common among psychopaths, including superficial charm; absence of nervousness; unreliability; untruthfulness and insincerity; lack of insight; lack of remorse or shame; inadequately motivated antisocial behavior (as opposed to non-psychopaths, who might commit antisocial acts out of desperation or for other clear reasons); poor judgment and failure to learn from experience; pathologic egocentricity and incapacity for love; poverty in major affective (emotional) reactions; interpersonal unresponsiveness; impersonal, trivial sex life; and failure to follow any life plan.53 Batman’s foes broadly demonstrate most of these qualities. Some, like the Joker, show signs of them all.
A person could have many of these qualities without having them all. Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go to Work54 laid out core deficits that might produce psychopaths who are not physically aggressive. Some fail and get imprisoned for white collar crimes while others successfully avoid criminal sanction yet cause interpersonal problems for everyone who works around them.55 Layfolk and the media bandy the term psychopath about so commonly in connection with serial killers and other clear-cut fiends that people popularly overestimate the criminality, severity, and sheer twistedness of most psychopaths. The person with no conscience, no empathy anywhere in his or her soul, might or might not take an interest in violence or sadistic cruelty. Consider the stockbroker who misappropriates millions, gutting retirement funds and fleecing so many who entrust their savings to him, indifferent to lives wrecked along the way and even resentful toward those darn complainers.
Prognosis: Do Psychopaths Get Better?
Diagnosis involves naming a person’s condition, identifying what’s wrong whether that means determining physical ailments like measles and malaria, mental illnesses like PTSD and major depression, or personality issues and disorders that not everyone considers to be mental illnesses. A prognosis is a forecast, the clinician’s estimate (best guess) about a condition’s probable course, duration, and eventual outcome. Prognosis for psychopathy and various personality disorders is poor. Criminals without ingrained personality problems such as psychopathy and APD are more likely to reform.
No medication can make a psychopath grow a conscience, and they do not respond well to therapy. Doctors typically prescribe medication to those with antisocial personality disorder only when they exhibit comorbid conditions (any additional disorders they also happen to have) like addiction or depression,56 although psychopaths “usually do not exhibit mental disorders, either mild or severe,”57 so therapists often don’t even have that much to work on. Psychopaths lack insight, drive, and incentive to change. “Because they aren’t disturbed by their behavior, they are rarely genuinely motivated to change, which makes any real collaboration between therapist and patient unlikely.”58 In fact, some forms of therapy seem to make them worse by allowing them to hone their skills at manipulating others.59 Treatment for antisocial non-psychopaths nets better results by fostering impulse control, teaching them to recognize triggers that set off their problematic behaviors, and helping them improve problem-solving skills.60 Cognitive skills training seeks to modify how an offender thinks, targeting problem-solving and perspective-taking skills, while cognitive restructuring works on what the criminals think (specific values, attitudes, not blaming others, ways to minimize harm).61
Antisocial personality disorder, the diagnosis that focuses on antisocial actions, does not often appear in old age. Age-related reductions in impulsivity, social deviance, and antisocial behavior do not prove time has warmed up antisocial individuals’ cold hearts. Older psychopaths, while exhibiting fewer of the impulsive, antisocial actions that might get them arrested or diagnosed with antisocial personality disorder,62 nevertheless remain frequently selfish, callous, deceitful, manipulative, and deficient in empathy toward others.63 Losing the ability to stir up as much mayhem as they may have in younger days does not necessarily turn them into warm, caring human beings.
Meet Joe Chill
Which kind of crook killed the Waynes? We don’t know much about their killer, the mugger Joe Chill. Much as we might like to demonize the man whose sins launched a billionaire vigilante’s war on crime, he seems to be a small-time thug who panics when Thomas Wayne stands up for Martha and then she screams. The few stories that depict confrontations between Chill and the grown Batm
an show him to have become a career criminal, maybe becoming a hard-nosed mob hitman64 or maybe a mid-level crime boss whom Batman terrifies.65 Either way, antisocial personality disorder seems likely. The hitman version, while seeming more coldly psychopathic than the terrified crime boss incarnation, comes across as more human and more interested in other people than many of Batman’s foes.66
Earthy Joe Chill would seem out of place in a gathering of Batman’s flamboyant, most malevolent foes. Neither does he belong among the lunatics crazy enough or idiots dumb enough to take jobs as supervillains’ henchmen. Batman may spend more time taking down everyday criminals reminiscent of Chill, but he more famously fights freaks, among whom the distinctions between the different evil disorders matter little because most of them fit the whole lot.
CASE FILE 6–1 Bane
Real name: Unknown
First appearance: Batman: Vengeance of Bane #1 (January, 1993).
Origin: A corrupt court system imprisons a woman in a hellish South American prison, Peña Dura, for the crimes of her lover, a revolutionary who evades capture. After she dies, their son has to serve out their sentence in that prison where he was born.1 He grows up among killers and madmen. He plays with the rats. Bane, this child of two fierce warriors, learns from hardened criminals and a visiting Jesuit priest, whose books provide the boy a classical education and whose gifts of toys give him some solace—especially his teddy bear, Osito, which the boy considers his only friend. A hole in Osito’s back conceals a knife that Bane uses against those who bully him. Bruce Wayne at age 8 sees his parents murdered; Bane at 8 commits his first murder. Bane pushes himself to become harder, stronger, deadlier every day, to do more than survive there. He means to thrive. Killing dozens of other inmates along the way, Bane establishes himself as king of the convicts. An experimental drug called Venom, expected to kill him like previous test subjects, instead gives him monstrous strength. He engineers a jailbreak and heads for Gotham City, attracted by the challenge of beating Gotham’s Dark Knight. After exhausting Batman by freeing all of Arkham Asylum’s villains, Bane attacks him at Wayne Manor and breaks the hero’s back, earning Bane his reputation as “the man who broke the Bat” and forcing a recuperating Bruce to enlist a hero called Azrael to take his place temporarily as Gotham’s guardian.
“I’ve known you since I lived in the hell of a dark hole thousands of miles from here. I’ve known you in my dreams. And I escaped from that hell—escaped from my dreams—for one reason only. To find you—and to break you.”
—Bane to Batman in Batman #496 (July, 1993)
Bane is to Batman what a juggernaut called Doomsday is to Superman: a brand-new Big Bad who comes out of nowhere, causes chaos all around, and then delivers the hero his greatest defeat. Bane’s drive to beat Batman for the sheer sake of beating Batman illustrates his strong achievement motivation, Need for Achievement: the need to overcome obstacles, to attain a lofty standard, and to rival and surpass others. Biochemist Henry Murray, who turned toward a career in psychology after psychiatrist Carl Jung guided him through his personal dilemmas, identified a variety of needs that motivate and direct human behavior.2 Not everyone has every need. Over the course of a lifetime, a person might or might not experience them all. Needs can influence particular individuals so regularly that the possession of a consistent need becomes part of those individuals’ personalities. Following up on this, psychologist David McClelland asserted that three dominant needs comprise human motivation: Need for Achievement (NAch), Need for Power (NPow), and Need for Affiliation (NAffil).3 A person could feel driven toward achievements unrelated to power and affiliation. Bane yearns for power, too, but belittles affiliation.
“It is the nature of plans involving others. They are flawed because humans are flawed. I will miss the antics of my foolish associates, especially the girl. But I cannot be Bane with them attached to me. The authorities think they have won. But my plan left no room for error. Either I conquered my enemy or I was set free of all encumbrances, even the girl. It was caring. It was emotion that made me weak. And now I am free of it. As I planned all along.”
—Bane in Secret Six #36 (October, 2011)4
He understands strength in numbers and can enjoy a few people’s company, but as he lacks incentive to maintain that enjoyment, he demonstrates low Need for Affiliation, the need to belong with others. Those who value affiliation most, requiring approval and interpersonal connection, make good team members but poor leaders. Reflecting on his few tentative attachments makes Bane decide they put him at risk because enemies could use those bonds against him, so he parts ways with a group called the Secret Six.
Subsidiation refers to situations in which one need activates to satisfy another. Bane’s Need for Power, secondary to his Need for Achievement, supplements that greater motivation. Power helps him achieve. Personal power, power over himself, he believes helps him attain power over others. The everyday management of any criminal organization would leave him dissatisfied if that power posed insufficient challenge. He weans himself off Venom, a source of physical might, when he decides addiction to Venom would be weakness, and yet he risks addiction again at times when the Venom offers him an advantage in pursuing a valued goal.
“It doesn’t matter who we are. What matters is our plan. No one cared who I was until I put on the mask.”
—Bane (Tom Hardy) in The Dark Knight Rises (2012 motion picture)
Notes
1. Greening (1997).
2. Patterson, Kosson, & Newman (1987); Van Goozen, Fairchild, Snoek, & Harold (2007).
3. Bartol & Bartol (2010), 102.
4. Newman, Widom, & Nathan (1985).
5. Hughes & Johnson (1975).
6. Dollinger & LaMartina (1998); La Voie (1973).
7. For example, Penguin: Pain and Prejudice #1–2 (2011–2012).
8. Maslow (1954).
9. Catwoman #0 (1994).
10. Shadow of the Bat Annual #3 (1995).
11. Penguin: Pain and Prejudice #1–2 (2011–2012).
12. Catwoman #39 (1996).
13. Maslow (1966).
14. Cianci & Gambrel (2003).
15. Secret Origins trade paperback (1989).
16. May (1983).
17. Batman Special #1 (1984).
18. New Year’s Evil: Prometheus #1 (1998).
19. JLA: Earth 2 (2000).
20. Watson (1913).
21. Bandura (1973).
22. Neisser (1967).
23. Marian Breland Bailey, B. F. Skinner’s second graduate student, many personal communications (1994–2001).
24. Lewin (1951).
25. Gottesman (1991); Kendler (1983); Tienari, Wahlberg, & Wynne (2006).
26. Berkowitz (1962).
27. DSM-IV-TR.
28. Khan (n.d.)
29. Frick & Ellis (1999).
30. Harris (2006).
31. DSM-IV-TR.
32. McCabe, Hough, Wood, & Yeh (2001).
33. Detective Comics #875 & 879 (2011).
34. Hare (1991, 1996); Hare & Neumann (2006).
35. Detective Comics #875 (2011).
36. DSM-IV-TR.
37. Lahey, Moffitt, & Caspi (2003); Raine (2002); Van Goozen & Fairchild (2008).
38. Detective Comics #879 (2011).
39. Harris & Rice (2006).
40. Detective Comics #881 (2011).
41. Davis & Whalen (2001).
42. Messich, Tarter, & Carvlin (n.d.).
43. Catwoman #0 (1994).
44. Batman: Cacophony #1–3 (2008–2009).
45. Batman: Cacophony #1–3 (2008–2009).
46. Batman and the Outsiders #14 (1984).
47. DSM-I, 38.
48. Bartol & Bartol (2005), 119.
49. Red Hood: The Lost Days #1 (2008).
50. Hare (2003).
51. Skeem & Cooke (2010).
52. Cleckley (1941/1988).
53. Cleckley, 338–339.
54. Babiak & Hare (2006).
55
. Felthous & Henning (2010).
56. Gacono et al. (2001).
57. Bartol & Bartol (2005), 122.
58. Rosenberg & Kosslyn (2011), 599.
59. Hare (1996); Hart (1998).
60. Fabiano, Robinson, & Porporino (1990); MacKenzie (2001).
61. Lipsey, Chapman, & Landenberger (2001); Spiropoulous, Spruance, Van Voorhis, & Schmitt (2005); Van Voorhis, Braswell, & Lester (2004).
62. Putkonen et al. (2010).
63. Harpur & Hare (1994).
Batman and Psychology: A Dark and Stormy Knight (Wiley Psychology & Pop Culture) Page 14
