A Freudian might take the view that the three-part Batman character (Bruce façade, Batman as superhuman symbol, and the real man behind both) represents the three major structures of personality—not that they directly are the three structures, simply that they could symbolize them. At the beginning of life, personality consists of nothing but id, the innate animal self driven by those inborn instincts.a It operates on the pleasure principle, seeking immediate gratification, immediate fulfillment of needs and desires. Playboy Bruce would embody the id. Around age three, we develop the ego, the executive structure that includes the conscious mind and learns to operate on the reality principle. Whereas an infant has no concept of patience, no initial tolerance for waiting, children will learn that we can often achieve greater satisfaction by waiting. Because Batman is the main self, the identity that all Bruce’s other efforts support, he might represent the ego. When his surrogate mother, Dr. Leslie Thompkins, gestures to the bat insignia on his chest and says, “This isn’t the real you, Bruce,” he tells her, “It’s the only me there is, Leslie.”6 Batcave Bruce, the hero unmasked and partially costumed down in the Batcave, the one place he might speak freely or reveal his injuries, sits at his giant computer using analysis and rational thought to achieve things his fists cannot—guided by the basic morality exemplified by surrogate father Alfred, who represents his conscience. This part of the superhero could represent that conscience, his superego. Both id and superego influence the ego, which must balance their respective wants to forge its own path, something strong-willed Batman with his great strength of ego should handle well.
Why is Batman so strong-willed? Where did he get such discipline and self-control? Freud would credit Bruce’s toilet training. Freud believed we experience a series of psychosexual stages of development that sculpt our psyches and have lasting impact throughout our lives, each stage focusing on a different erogenous zone (sexually excitable area) with a distinct manner by which we go about satisfying those life-and-death instincts. In any stage, a person might develop a fixation, failing to outgrow that stage emotionally whether because of trauma, underindulgence (which creates a lingering ache to satisfy unfulfilled needs), or overindulgence (which makes the child too comfortable to want to mature).
Age Stage Developmental Tasks According to Freud
0–18 months Oral Id, the inborn, instinctive part of personality, dominates and operates on the pleasure principle, seeking immediate fulfillment of needs and desires. Oral activities (sucking, eating, crying, biting) satisfy life and death instincts. Fixation results in oral-passive (e.g.,smoking, overeating) or oral-aggressive (biting, criticizing) habits.
18 months–3 years Anal Toilet training teaches self-control, promoting development of the ego. Fixation produces anal-retentive (clenched, uptight, overcontrolled, excessively neat) or anal-expulsive (impulsive, impatient, undercontrolled, slovenly) personality.
3 to 5 or 6 Phallic The child resolves sexual and aggressive feelings toward parents by becoming more like the same-gender parent, incorporating morals and values to develop the superego.
5 or 6 to puberty Latency Sex drive is latent, not manifest, thus freeing the psyche to learn social and academic skills.
Puberty until ??? Genital The sex drive returns.
Whether Bruce’s parents died when he was 6 as Frank Miller writes7 or 8 according to Dennis O’Neil8 and others, the boy would have recently passed through the phallic stage’s most intense conflict, which Freud considered early life’s most important issue. He believed phallic stage fixation could produce narcissism (obsessive self-love), flamboyance (running around wearing a cape surely qualifies), or homosexuality (despite a lack of subsequent evidence to show that he was right about that). While he might have concurred with psychiatrist Fredric Wertham’s contention that Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson were living a homosexual “wish dream,”9 Freud did not view homosexuality as deviant.
Freud’s key ideas about the phallic stage originated in his treatment of a boy he called Little Hans in his writings.10 Hans suffered such severe equinophobia, fear of horses, that he would barely go outside, horses being as common circa 1900 as cars are today. Freud concluded that the reason Hans was so afraid of being bitten by a horse was that he was in love with his mother and afraid his father was going to castrate him. Freud considered him a little Oedipus, after the figure from Greek tragedy who kills his own father and marries his motherb—hence, the Oedipus complex. Regardless of whether Freud was right about Hans’s fear of a horse biting him symbolizing the deeper fear that his father might castrate him, Hans did have fantasies about marrying Mommy, animosity toward his father, and preoccupation with the fear that they might cut off part of his anatomy—although in his case, he had reason for the castration anxiety. He had been told that if he did not stop fidgeting with his “widdler,” it would get cut off—and his little sister didn’t have one. They’d done it before! Many sources erroneously credit Freud for proposing an equivalent Electra complexc for girls when, in fact, Freud refuted Carl Jung’s Electra proposal.11 Freud generalized Hans’s phallic preoccupation to all children, positing that castration anxiety worried every little boy and penis envy irked every little girl. Hans eventually began acting more like his father, incorporating the man’s manner and moral values, which Freud interpreted as an act of identification, becoming more like the father in order to get along with him. Each little boy supposedly develops his superego, the conscience, so Dad won’t threaten his penis and each little girl develops hers so she can psychologically grow one.
In Freud’s view, therefore, Bruce has undergone that entire conflict—including a wish to have his father out of the way and occasional resentment toward his mother for being with his father—but could have recently resolved this by identifying with his father and crystallizing his superego, his moral core. Now entering latency, that period of time when Freud of all people did not see much of anything sexual going on, the boy would no longer be the sex fiend he was back at age five. (Remember, we’re still exploring Planet Freud for the moment—most of us do not consider preschoolers’ underlying motivation primarily sexual in nature.) Instead, his mind is opening itself up to picking up new skills and learning about the great big world, right when a mugger’s bullets shatters that world.
Batman vs. Hamlet, Act I: Murder Most Foul
“Dead! They’re d-dead.”
—Bruce Wayne, Detective Comics #33 (November 1939)
“Murder most foul, as in the best it is; but this most foul, strange, and unnatural.”
—Ghost, Hamlet, Act I, Scene V
To help us speculate on what Freud might have said about Batman, we can glean clues by looking at what he had to say about another fictional character whose parents get murdered, a young man with different Oedipal issues, William Shakespeare’s Prince Hamlet. Differences between Batman and Hamlet still prove useful in this task. In both stories, the hero’s father gets murdered first—Bruce’s father, Dr. Thomas Wayne, by a mugger who wants to steal the mother’s pearls; Hamlet’s father, King Hamlet, by the uncle who wants to steal the mother and the crown. Bruce witnesses the murder; Hamlet later learns his father’s death had been a murder. Martha Wayne gets robbed and murdered; Hamlet’s mother, Gertrude, marries her husband’s murderer and later gets inadvertently murdered by him as well. Bruce has few doubts; Hamlet has them aplenty. Bruce knows that murder has occurred but not the killer’s identity; Hamlet knows the killer’s identity but needs to confirm that it was murder. Bruce Wayne is an active, decisive individual who knows what he wants, forms a plan, and pursues it; Hamlet is passive and uncertain, although to some extent he has good reason to proceed with caution. In case the spirit that visited Hamlet was not actually his father’s ghost but was instead some demon trying to trick him into murdering a man, he first wants to prove murder happened at all. He and Bruce both want to be better than the killers they pursue. They both resist killing.
For centuries, scholars have contemplated why Hamlet g
oes through the elaborate ruse of acting insane while hesitating to kill his uncle even after establishing the man’s guilt. Freud said Hamlet perceives his murderous uncle as “the man who shows him the repressed wishes of his own childhood realized.”12 The killer reminds the son, at least unconsciously, of the part of himself that wanted to eliminate his father and have his mother to himself. Freud would likely have considered it significant that Bruce Wayne’s father dies first. By taking the mother’s necklace—established by later stories to have been a gift from Thomas, a symbol of their affection—and shooting her too, the mugger would remind Bruce of any occasional resentment he’d felt toward her for choosing father over son.
Both newly fatherless sons take oaths. Whereas Bruce actively chooses to avenge his parents, Hamlet receives a spectral mandate to avenge. Note that in their respective oaths, neither son vows to slay his father’s slayer, and neither promises to punish the man who has given his own Oedipal fantasy its reality. Bruce swears to take action, “to avenge their deaths by spending the rest of my life warring on all criminals,” not to devote himself to hunting down the man who killed them. Hamlet vows inaction, in that he gets his friends to join him in swearing only that they won’t tell anybody they saw a ghost.
Batman vs. Hamlet, Act II: The Defense Mechanisms
“Years ago, I created a mighty lie: an almost demonic creature of violence and vengeance…. But the lie was born to serve the greater good.”
—Batman, Batman: Absolution (2003)
“Though this be madness, yet there’s method in it.”
—Polonius, Hamlet, Act II, Scene II
One area where many psychologists view Freud favorably is his proposal that we use a variety of automatic tactics to protect ourselves from anxiety, especially against threats to self-image, often without realizing we’re using these defense mechanisms (or ego defense mechanisms). We all lie to ourselves sometimes. We avoid topics that unnerve us, devalue things we can’t have (“sour grapes”), and shield ourselves from stress in many other ways. Sigmund’s daughter Anna Freud deserves credit for giving names to numerous processes that her father had described without labeling and for identifying additional defense mechanisms he never addressed.13
Freud saw Hamlet, Prince of Denmark as a story of repression, whereby the unconscious mind hides disturbing wishes, thoughts, and experiences from conscious awareness. Unlike Oedipus, who kills his own father and marries his mother, Hamlet sees a man other than himself live out his childhood Oedipal fantasy, a fantasy Freud said Hamlet has repressed. “Thus the loathing which should drive him on to revenge is replaced in him by self-reproaches, by scruples no better than the sinner whom he is to punish.”14 Batman’s story, on the other hand, is one of displacement, acting on one’s feelings but focusing them on a different target because the original target is inappropriate or unavailable—for example, rather than pursue your roommate’s boyfriend whom you find desirable, you convince yourself you’re having those feelings about his buddy. Because Batman never brings his parents’ killer to justice,d every hoodlum he hits serves as a substitute for the man who slayed them.
Using defense mechanisms can be healthy, even necessary, to keep harsh reality from overwhelming us. The American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM)15 distinguishes the defenses that help us best cope with reality. These “mature” defenses, as Vaillant called them,16 maximize our ability to feel good about life while staying aware of memories, feelings, and thoughts. Hamlet still has his wit, his sense of humor, with a particular fondness for wordplay, but for the most part he utilizes fewer of these healthier defenses than Batman does. Bruce Wayne lives a life of altruism, self-assertion, and, even as distant as Batman might seem, greater affiliation with his sidekicks, superhero teams, and the rest of Gotham’s Bat-Family (Batgirl, Oracle, etc.) than anything Hamlet shows. Although each has a confidant (Alfred for Batman, Horatio for Hamlet), Hamlet more consistently than Batman cuts himself off from all others. Thought suppression helps Batman keep distractions from weakening his focus, but suppressed thoughts remain easily accessible to the conscious mind, unlike all the things Hamlet keeps repressed. Batman exemplifies one definition of the defense introjection in that he identifies so strongly with a particular image or symbol that he has incorporated it into his identity. Spending at least 15 years training himself in anticipation of his crime-fighting mission differs markedly from Hamlet’s often aimless hesitation. During that anticipatory period, Bruce Wayne passes up opportunities to develop friends and girlfriends, discarding college acquaintances even though he wants them, “and the ache he felt seemed to fill his entire being. He learned to ignore the ache, and the pain of loss and isolation. These were the conditions of his life, and he accepted them.”17 Social and sexual drives get rerouted into training for his mission—this is an example of sublimation, feeling one need or impulse but channeling that energy into some other activity.
Both Bruce and Hamlet use mental inhibitions, the mildly neurotic defense mechanisms that compromise information, keeping fears and other potential threats hidden from our awareness. Like a police detective who must separate whatever feelings he has about a case from the thoughts and actions needed to do his job, Batman has feelings but must isolate those affective reactions from the brutal reality he faces. He tries not to let shock slow him down or anger blind his perception. He and Hamlet both channel emotional energy into analysis, but Hamlet overanalyzes to the point of intellectualization, using reason to avoid confrontation with an unconscious conflict. Both use reaction formation, a type of sublimation in which the person has one impulse but does the opposite instead, as when they each drive away women they find appealing—in Hamlet’s case, cruelly so.
Hamlet uses more dysfunctional defenses than Batman—apathetic withdrawal after his father dies, idealization of that father, devaluation of the mother, rationalization (making excuses) for his hesitation to avenge his father even after satisfying himself that his uncle committed murder, and passive aggression throughout. Hamlet is suicidal. Batman is not. He survived that night in the alley and remains a survivor night after night.
Batman vs. Hamlet, Act III: Theatricality and Deception
“Theatricality and deception are powerful agents. You must become more than just a man in the mind of your opponent.”
—Ducard (Liam Neeson), Batman Begins
“We are all errant knaves; believe none of us.”
—Hamlet, Hamlet, Act III, Scene I
Both put on performances, one to expose a villain and the other to scare all villains. Hamlet plays the mad prince; Wayne plays both the bored playboy and the dark symbol that must become “more than a man.” Deception permeates their relationships, especially those that should be most intimate (with notable exceptions being their respective confidants), and yet they both enlist help in their deceptive practices. Playing “mad” helps Hamlet hide his suspicions toward his uncle but does nothing to help him expose or destroy the man. When a troupe of traveling actors happens to come along, Hamlet requests that they perform a specific play so that he might gauge his uncle’s reaction when they depict a murder similar to his father’s. Even those whom Batman deceives as Bruce Wayne, including Commissioner Gordon, help him with performances of his own.
When Hamlet finally uses violence, striking an eavesdropper behind an arras while hoping it’s the uncle he still cannot bring himself to confront face to face, he begins to illustrate the advantages of Batman’s healthier, more consistently active coping strategies. Hamlet kills the wrong person. Soon he shows signs of psychosis (mental illness or at least a temporary state in which the person is grossly out of touch with reality) when his father’s ghost reappears, but, unlike the Act I appearance when three others saw the ghost with him, his mother sees no ghost. Either she, having betrayed her late husband by remarrying so soon, is not permitted to see the ghost or Hamlet is having a hallucination, a psychotic symptom involving a false perceptio
n disconnected from real-world stimuli. Batman does not have delusions, beliefs grossly out of touch with reality, nor does he hallucinate—not unless exposed to some supervillain’s hallucinogenic toxin, spell, or telepathic whammy—but those are career hazards every superhero faces from time to time.
Batman vs. Hamlet: Curtains
“My thoughts be bloody, or be nothing else!”
—Hamlet, Hamlet, Act IV, Scene IV
“Chill, I want to tell you a story without an ending. Maybe you can supply it.”
—Batman to his parents’ killer, Batman #47 (1948)
Bruce Wayne carries out a long-term plan that includes avoidance of killing; what little plan Hamlet forms falls apart after he finally, blindly kills. Hamlet’s fate demonstrates why Batman draws the line he will not cross: Once the killing starts, the wrong people can suffer—a mistake no one can undo. Of the seven characters killed in Hamlet’s latter half, five are not the originally intended or hoped-for targets. Only at the play’s end, when Hamlet stabs his uncle and then succumbs to his own envenomed wound, do the intended victims die.
Batman and Psychology: A Dark and Stormy Knight (Wiley Psychology & Pop Culture) Page 21
